


Mutualism

by Flamesong



Series: Symbiosis Trilogy [3]
Category: Warframe
Genre: Communism, F/F, Kidnapping, LGBTQ Jewish Character(s), Lesbians in Space, Minor Character Death, Multiplicity/Plurality, No Lesbians Die, Redemption, Resurrection, Suicide, Transphobia, here's how a canon-era storyline could have been better, in case the first two books weren't enough of a callout for DE's writers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-05-20 05:42:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19370677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flamesong/pseuds/Flamesong
Summary: Hunhow has been freed from his tomb, and through his alliance with the Stalker, has brought Lua crashing out of the Void. The Grineer are a constant threat, and the Corpus are Orokin in all but aesthetic. In some ways, it's like the Old War never ended at all.The two Lotuses will need all the help they can get to bring peace to the Origin System, even if that means finding some unlikely allies.





	1. The Second Apostate, part 1

“My child… so beautiful to behold. How do you feel?” The Lotus smiled kindly down at the weary Tenno. This child’s muscles were weak from centuries of disuse, and the strain of Void powers used against Hunhow’s drones and his Stalker ally left her even more fatigued. But she was safe now, away from the Reservoir on Lua where so many other Tenno still slept, unaware that their weakness had been exposed. 

“I’m confused,” the Tenno said, struggling to push words out through a stiff and dry throat. “I thought I was…”

“I know. Forgive me. This is who you really are: a Tenno. More than human… but once a child like any other. What do you remember?”

The girl strained to push through the years of dreaming to a world beyond, a time before she became a warrior. “A jumble of words, numbers… I must have known everything about the Tau. Our teacher loved when I corrected her.”

“Ah, of course…” The Lotus knew exactly what this child was remembering. “Memories from your time aboard the Zariman Ten-Zero, before the Void jump accident. It was years before the ship was recovered. It was drifting dead in space, all her crew gone… except the children.”

“We were just kids, but… they were afraid of what we could do. When they tried to treat us like rats I stood up to them. I wasn’t going to let them divide us after what we’d been through.” Tears welled up in the Tenno’s eyes as she thought back on the years following the Zariman’s recovery. They had indeed been divided, the groups they formed for safety and survival split up first into cells of a dozen children each, then further into teams of two to five after the Orokin had made them into weapons of war. 

“You were so brave, Sylfe. The Orokin were afraid of you. The Void had changed you and you couldn’t control it, no one could. Together you were so much more than the sum of individuals, so they split you apart. They were about to destroy the orphans of Ten-Zero but Margulis... she loved you, she found a way. Even if it cost her humanity, she couldn’t leave you.” 

At the mention of Margulis’s name, the Tenno’s eyes widened and the first tears dropped down her cheek. “We couldn’t help it, the outbursts. We hurt her, blinded her, but she never abandoned us. She brought us peace, she sang to us in the cold dark of our cells… The Orokin murdered her.”

“They undid her work, stopped the healing she offered, and in its place they created Transference.” The Lotus’s motherly voice was tinged with anger now, and she had to pause a moment to calm herself. “Your mind, projected via the Void into a surrogate, one strong enough to withstand your power. It felt like waking up, but it was just a lucid, second dream.”

“On some level we must have known,” Sylfe said. “I remembered what it was like to be afraid, to be weak. I vowed never to forget that, never to abuse what I had been given. I had a code.”

“And so you became a Tenno in service to the Orokin. Bound by honor, above greed. Always remembering Margulis, her words, her song, long after they told you she was gone. Do you recognize me, my child?” The Lotus stopped and looked away, as if listening to a voice only she could hear. She put both hands to her head and took a deep breath to steel herself, then gently lifted the mask off her head. “Do not fear the darkness… Mother’s song is here… You are safe among us… All is well.” 

Her singing voice was rough and out of tune, but those words were instantly recognizable to any Tenno. Combined with the prominent scar across her face and the white, cloudy eyes, there could be no doubt as to her identity. “Oh, Sylfe, I never died,” Margulis said. “I lost you for a while, but I was there to catch you when your masters fell.”

“That song… your song. How could I have forgotten your face? Margulis, I…”

“It’s okay, little one. How you’ve grown since I saw you last. I joined the Sentients to save myself, to save others like you. You fought me, but I never blamed you. I only wish I could have rescued you from Orokin control too. I’m sorry, I need to…” She placed the mask back over her head, and a sigh of relief escaped her lips. “I too am more than human now, but not like you. My only power is to be in many places at once, and it pains me to shrink down to only one.”

“You mean… like controlling multiple warframes at the same time? I’ve tried to do that, but it never works. Is that because I’m a human but forgot?”

Margulis nodded. “Your Transference link will only tune itself to a single target at a time. Transference keeps you safe. If your warframe is destroyed, you wake up in a different one or back here, but if one of my drones is destroyed I feel it. Forgive me for not waking you earlier, letting you remember who you were. You were asleep on the moon, and I thought you would be safer there in the Void where no one could find you.”

“It’s okay,” Sylfe said. “You’ve always looked out for me. I don’t blame you for keeping a few things hidden. Like back there on Uranus, all that about your personal life. I didn’t need to know that.” The Tenno’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Wait… if you’re Margulis, why did you say you were that other person, the Sentient’s daughter?”

“During your time with the Orokin, you missed the creation of the Lotus. When I said I joined the Sentients, I meant it literally. I am joined to another Sentient mind, through here.” Margulis reached up to touch her mask. “She was the one guiding you during those missions, not me.” 

“And that’s who Hunhow was talking to, his daughter Natah?”

Margulis bristled with anger and both her hands balled into fists. She let out a slow breath and spoke in a carefully controlled voice. “Please, never say that name again. Erase it from your memory. My wife’s true name is Breazeal.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t know. Teshin said it so I thought it was okay. Should I tell him what you just told me?”

Margulis relaxed her posture but her words retained their dark tone. “No, we’ll sort out Teshin ourselves. He’s been a good ally for many years, but that was very rude of him. I hope it’s not his old personal baggage affecting him again after so long. Anyway, you should rest.” She smiled down at her adoptive daughter. “Take some time to adjust to being awake again, and if there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to call on me. Even if just to talk. Normally we would keep this human form safely away from all the action, but it seems I’ll have it around for a while longer now that Lua is under attack. We have a lot more Tenno to wake up.”

The Tenno stretched her legs, then pushed herself up out of the Transference pod. She stumbled on weak legs forward a few steps to throw her arms around Margulis. “Thank you, Lotus… Margulis… mother.” 

Margulis returned the gesture, holding the Tenno close for as long as Sylfe needed comfort. “Sweet dreams, my child,” she murmured as they finally separated. She helped the girl back into her somatic link and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead, then turned to leave the Tenno’s orbiter. The Liset side of the airlock slid open as she approached, opened by the attentive ship Cephalon, and Margulis spread her own consciousness into the Lotus ship on the other side to unlock the second door. 

Once aboard her familiar transport, she settled the human body down into the chair where she made all her broadcasts to the Tenno around the solar system. She willed the mechanical arm above to lower its camera down to face her, but her wife’s voice touched her mind before she could begin a transmission. 

“How’d it go?” Breazeal asked. “Is the kid okay? What happened with Stalker?”

“She’s fine, if a little confused. Stalker was gone by the time I got to her. Probably ran when he saw someone was coming to help that poor Tenno.” Margulis sighed. “She’d been dreaming and fighting for so long, she forgot who she really was. If they’re all like that, we’ve really got our work cut out for us. There’s what, almost a thousand of them still sleeping on Lua? They won’t know that they’re not safe anymore.”

“We’ve got more than sixteen hundred who are fully aware,” the other half of the Lotus reminded her. “Lua is only a weakness to those Tenno who were with the Orokin at the end of the Old War. Tell everyone what’s going on and they can defend the Reservoirs against the Stalker and Hunhow. They could even help wake up the others.”

“I’m not sure… It’s not like the old days when Tenno fought each other, we’re all on the same side now, but I still think it would be better if my face is the first thing they see when they wake up.”

“Margulis, it’s a  _ thousand _ Tenno! You’d be there for weeks, and it would occupy way too much of your attention. Let the kids help each other out.”

“Okay, fine,” she relented. “But I want to be there too. I’d forgotten how much I missed seeing these kids in person. But, back to being mission control for a minute first.” Margulis flipped the camera on and mentally formed the connection between its video feed and her ship’s transmitters, to begin dictating a message to every Tenno’s inbox. 

“Tenno! I have grave news for you all today, and a new mission of vital importance. The Sentient Hunhow, a powerful being from the Old War, has resurfaced. Through his efforts, Earth’s moon has also returned, and with it comes a weakness for many Tenno. I need all available Tenno to go to Lua and defend it. Hunhow may attack in many forms, but be prepared for these common drones.” Margulis summoned mental images of a battalyst and a conculyst, replacing the lavender of her own drones with a burnt orange, and sent them out alongside the message. 

“Sentient fighters will adapt to damage until it becomes harmless to them. Void energy is the only thing he will be incapable of countering, so your Operator form is key. If you are unaware of this ability, you are likely among the ones at risk when the Reservoirs are exposed. I’m afraid I can’t send you coordinates as Hunhow may be capable of listening in on my communications, but if you see something like this–” She sent an image of a small Reservoir with six golden Transference pods. “–then inform your teammates and defend it at all costs. 

“Be on guard for Grineer and Corpus threats as well. They will surely notice that the moon has returned and they will both want to control it, and pillage whatever Orokin technology and secrets remain there.” A loud thud reverberated through Margulis’s ship, and she briefly dropped the calm, businesslike face she always put on when giving mission instructions. “Defending Lua takes priority over all other–” Margulis stopped suddenly as a series of quieter metallic clicks echoed from down the hall in front of her, followed by the hiss of an automatic door sliding open. “Tenno, this briefing will continue later. I believe someone has just broken into my ship.” 

Margulis cut off the transmission abruptly and raised the camera back up to its storage position near the ceiling. She called for Breazeal and the other Lotus responded, easing herself into the human body alongside its original owner until they shared control of it equally. Together they watched with nervous anticipation for whatever had gotten through their ship’s door to show itself, while they each picked up control of numerous other drones around the solar system. A ship full of Sentient fighter drones was dispatched from the Lagrange point co-orbiting ahead of Earth to meet up with them over Lua as soon as it could get there. 

A black warframe walked down the center of the hall toward the Lotus, smoke rising from its body and the prominent spikes of a golden Isabeau Prime syandana visible above its shoulders. From the shape of its body it seemed to be an Excalibur, but its helmet was more rounded and lacked the horn at the front. It stopped just inside the door and stared threateningly toward the unarmed human body before it. 

“To think that I went through so much trouble to find you,” the Stalker growled, “only to have you deliver yourself to me. All the Tenno I’ve hunted, all the warframes I’ve destroyed… it’s all been for you,  _ Lotus _ .” The warframe snorted derisively. “To draw you out of hiding, so that I can finally make you pay for what you’ve done. But in the end, all it took was a little cooperation with your father. The love you pretend to show for those devils wasn’t enough to motivate you, but fear gets a reaction… You fear him, and now you should fear  _ me _ .” 

The Stalker waited a long moment, staring into the blue light on the front of the Lotus’s mask. “Well?” he challenged. “Say something, Sentient!” 

The two Sentients jointly controlling the human body coordinated their thoughts and spoke calmly with a single voice. “Stalker. What do you hope to gain from this? Terrorizing innocent children hardly seems like what’s right for the system.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. They aren’t innocent, and neither are you. Or have you forgotten just as much as they have about what you did during the Old War? How you came to destroy your creators, and the devil children betrayed their own kind to fight with you? I remember. I was there.”

“What matters now is the present, not the past. How did you get aboard my ship?” the Lotus demanded. 

“You may have forgotten, but this machine has not. Your ship doesn’t know that the Old War ended a hundred and twenty years ago. It doesn’t know that the Orokin Empire, the people who built it before you stole it for your own purposes, are long since gone. It doesn’t care, and there’s no Cephalon here to care in its place. It’s just a big dumb hunk of computer hardware, and the only thing it cares about… is that I happen to have a valid access code.”

“That’s impossible. I removed all of the authentication software when I made this ship my own.”

The Stalker jerked his head back and to one side. “See for yourself, if you like. I walked into that Tenno girl’s ship without a struggle, and I can do the same here. I should have invaded one of their orbiters long ago, if that’s what it took to bring you to me. Of course, as if I really needed more reason to despise you, the moment you choose to exert your influence directly once the Tenno proxies have failed, you insult me personally.” 

He reached up with his left hand to grasp the hilt of a weapon concealed beneath his syandana. He drew it forth slowly to reveal a serrated blade of orange metal lined with glowing energy fields, with one of its two prongs sharply broken off near the base. “I know it was you behind that empty Zephyr. I know you can control any warframe that you or the Tenno built. This was a good sword your father made for me, and you destroyed it.” He tossed the broken War unceremoniously at the Lotus’s feet. 

Margulis and Breazeal shifted their control of the body slightly to make their movement smooth as they leaned down to pick up the blade. They turned it over in their hands a few times, then gazed back at the Stalker and asked innocently, “And for that you’ve come to kill me? If you’ve had dealings with Hunhow, you must know how Sentients work. In fact, if you fought in the Old War like you claim, we might have even crossed blades before. Why threaten someone when we all know you can’t follow through? Just get a new sword and leave me and the Tenno alone.”

“We have fought before,” the Stalker said darkly. “I have destroyed many of your drones, but it is only this one that interests me. This body that does not belong to you. I will take it back, but not with any new sword… not when I still have this old one.” He raised his right hand to pull a second heavy blade from across his back. This one too had only a single edge, though unlike the broken War it had been designed as such. It was pure white and bent just a little bit concave, with a characteristic golden ring between the blade and the grip. 

“Paracesis…” the Lotus breathed, as the Stalker warframe gripped the sword tightly in both hands. “But that belonged to…”

A swirl of Void energy engulfed the warframe. Through the light a second figure could be seen, overlapping with the warframe’s outline, the pair effortlessly gliding through each other under the power of the Void. The Stalker’s operator kept hold of the greatsword’s hilt as he moved, leaving the Excalibur variant standing motionless behind him with its hands clenched around nothing. 

The figure that stood before them was superficially human, but his skin was a shiny gray and his hair seemingly formed into solid tubes of a bluer shade of the same almost metallic color. His eyes were pure white, like those of the biolyst beneath the Lotus mask, but they shone with some internal light that suggested their owner was not blind as Margulis had once been. The man’s right arm was abnormally long, and his shoulder covered with a metal shell inlaid with gears. 

But it was his legs which drew the Lotus’s attention, for they were not flesh at all, not even whatever modified form of flesh that his upper half was made of. Below the waist he had only twisted metal, crudely reshaped from what used to be a Sentient drone into a semblance of human legs. Though the surfaces had been scrubbed laboriously to remove any hint of their original color, enough remained in the crevasses and corners to tell that they had once been a pale lavender. 

“Ballas?” Margulis asked aloud. Within the confines of the Lotus’s shared mindscape she commented to her wife, “What happened to him? He hardly looks human anymore. He hardly looks alive.”

“I know, he’s almost more of a statue than a person,” Breazeal whispered back. “Maybe he ran out of kuva, and made those alterations to keep himself alive in the same body?”

“But we made this body immortal without any of that. Regular infusions of telomerase, nanobots in the blood to fight cancer, we even fixed the eyes for the rare occasion like today when I have to show my old face.” 

“Now you see how the Stalker goes where he pleases,” Ballas said, interrupting the pair’s silent communication. “There’s not a door in all the Empire which would deny the Prime Executor entry.” He paused, then spoke in a softer voice. “Forgive me, Margulis. If you’re still in there, if you can hear me…” He rose an inch off the ground and floated forward a few paces, extending his long right arm to offer a handshake. The Lotus crossed their arms across their chest to make a show of not accepting it. 

“I hear you, Ballas, but I will not forgive you,” Margulis told him. With the same voice, Breazeal continued, “Margulis lives, but the woman you see in your memories is gone. In fact, I doubt she ever existed in the way you think of her.”

“Lies from your blasphemous machine mind! I know she is imprisoned there, just as she was before. I will not abandon her again.”

“Imprisoned before, by whose hand? You could have recused yourself from my trial. You could have voted not guilty. Whatever your intentions were of saving Margulis, your actions show the opposite. I saved her first, because you were never going to.”

Ballas tightened his grip on the greatsword slung over his shoulder. “Why did you have to come into my life and ruin everything? I’ve waited so long for you to bring Margulis back, for you to be away from all your child soldiers in their tin suits. You will be mine again, my sweet flower…” He slowly brought the sword down into a ready position. 

The Lotus rebalanced their influence to give Breazeal full control over the body’s physical movement, while Margulis handled their perception and speech. Breazeal raised the broken War as she stood up from the lone seat in the center of the room. She stared Ballas down as her loving wife of many decades hissed at the intruder, “Never!” 

The pair clashed, sparks flying from both blades as they hammered against each other. They slowly circled the transmission center, Ballas inching forward step by step to push Breazeal back while she took care not to get backed into a wall. The Lotus had the advantage of seeing an overview of their battlefield through the camera stationed above, but its benefit alone could not turn the tide of battle. The former Executor was an outstanding fighter, and though Breazeal was also an expert at close-quarters combat, this was no conculyst that she controlled. This was a human body, and it was hardly in fighting shape. 

“What’s happened to you?” Margulis taunted. “I know we had our share of fights when we were a couple, but never anything like this.”

“When words fail, the sword will finish the job! Margulis could have recanted. She could have accepted the word of the Seven. But even when she refused, when stronger measures became necessary, I would at the very least have granted her a merciful death. But you, Sentient, there will be no mercy for an abomination like yourself.”

“Is there not a shred of humanity left in you? Was there ever? You may be fighting a Sentient but you’re talking to the real Margulis, and I don’t want you back! I wish she’d found me sooner, before I ever had the bad luck of meeting you!”

“You’re lying! You’re still the machine, making it all up.” Ballas pressed his assault with renewed fervor, pushing at Breazeal’s guard with all his might. A single blow slipped past the Sentient’s defense, aimed directly at the biolyst’s midsection, but at the last instant Ballas twisted his blade to strike them with the flat side rather than the edge. Breazeal stumbled and grabbed onto the motionless warframe near her to regain her balance. 

“On our first anniversary, we went to your favorite courtyard on Earth and sat under that big tree to watch the stars,” Margulis called out. “Could anyone else know that? It’s me, Ballas! Are you really prepared to kill me?”

“Better dead than controlled by this aberration,” Ballas replied, but his voice was wavering. “You’re under its thrall, not acting like yourself, like the one I love. You can fight it with me. I’m here to free you.” 

Another swing of Paracesis avoided deflection, this time cracking the blunt back side of the blade against Breazeal’s left hand. She gasped and let go with that hand, switching the broken War to a backward grip. With a normal blade she would brace the back side against her forearm to maintain power in her defense, but the War’s crooked shape made it difficult to take the strain off her wrist. 

“You’re not the person I thought I knew either, Ballas. And I don’t just mean the way you look, though that also leaves something to be desired.” Margulis tried her best to provoke a reaction from him, appealing to the vanity which she knew would never change in the hope of distracting the last Orokin from his goal. 

Her words had the desired effect, as Ballas took one forward jab at Breazeal then floated back out of striking range, spreading his arms wide and gazing down at himself. “Look what this robot has made me do! My beauty, my grace, my humanity… all ruined, and it’s to blame! The things I’ve been forced to go through to get you back…”

Breazeal took control of the vocal cords for just a moment to refute his claims. “That may be my drone you’re wearing, but I didn’t put it there. I didn’t ask for you to stalk us across the solar system. This is no one’s fault but your own.” 

Ballas dropped to the floor and used his robot legs to sprint forward as a human would. He brought his greatsword down in a zealous overhead chop, but Breazeal made no attempt to block it, merely stepping to the side to narrowly evade the swing. She stepped closer, so that they were nearly touching and neither could swing a blade effectively, and headbutted Ballas with her solid metal mask. 

The Orokin stumbled and a trickle of red escaped his injured nose. He engaged the levitation arrays in his legs again and rose off the ground, then planted one foot on the Lotus’s chest and shoved them back. He dropped again and lunged forward but held Paracesis still in front of him, more as a shield than a weapon, as he reached out to slip his arm under Breazeal’s and place his left hand along the blunt back edge of his sword. His mechanical feet stayed firmly planted on the ground as his upper body pivoted through a full circle on some robotic joint. 

The Lotus were yanked forward by their arm, and the broken War went flying from their grip. It clattered across the floor toward the front of the room, coming to a stop as it bounced lightly off the Stalker warframe’s foot. Ballas shoved the Sentients with his shoulder to keep them off balance, then brought his sword down, blunt side first, directly on the Lotus’s mask. 

The biolyst crumpled to the floor. Both members were still present in the body but were stunned for a moment, dropping control of some of their other drones around the solar system to try to focus on recovery. 

Ballas let go of his sword and knelt down over them. “Be free, my love,” he whispered. The biolyst stirred, uncoordinated as the two Sentients within struggled to sort out a clear division of control, but Ballas pressed more weight on them to keep them still. He leaned forward to stare into the mask’s single light. “Return to my side, where you belong…”

He grasped the Lotus mask in both hands, and lifted it off their head. A scream escaped the biolyst’s throat but was cut short as the human body lost consciousness. Elsewhere in the Origin System, every lavender drone shut down at once as the Lotus were overwhelmed with pain. This was not the safe disconnection that Margulis had done before, when she pulled back into the single body and gently separated from the network before returning again. This was tantamount to existing on both sides of the Void, a hard boundary suddenly driven through the minds of both members of the Lotus. 

The pair came to again in their internal mindscape, neither in control of any physical drones. They leaned against each other to catch their breath. Both of their virtual human forms appeared injured now as the agony of the separation manifested in their minds, but as minutes ticked by the residual pain lessened and their wounds faded from view. 

“Are you okay?” Margulis asked the question first, but both were thinking it. 

“I think so,” Breazeal replied softly. “You?”

“Same.” Margulis reached out for the biolyst but there was no connection, no way for her to insert herself back into the human body again. “I can’t get back to the biolyst. I think it’s gone. I mean, I renounced my humanity a long time ago, but I think it’s really official now.” She looked instead through the camera still held at the top of the room to survey what was going on inside their ship. 

Ballas was still on his knees but had moved off to the side of the biolyst, no longer holding it down. He caressed the human body’s face, speaking to it, but too softly for Margulis to hear from her vantage point above. The Stalker warframe still stood where he had left it, the broken War by its feet, and Paracesis lay abandoned as well a short ways from the human pair. The Lotus mask was in pieces, shattered by a sharp blow from Ballas’s sword after he had taken it from the biolyst’s head. 

The human body blinked and turned its head slightly. Margulis glanced over at her partner and asked, “Is that you controlling it? I can’t feel it myself. What did you do?”

“That’s not me,” Breazeal replied. “I’m locked out just like you are.”

“Well, if it’s not you, and it’s not me… then who’s that in the biolyst?” 


	2. The Second Apostate, part 2

“My love… so beautiful to behold. How do you feel?” Executor Ballas smiled down at the human laying before him. The woman’s muscles were weak from the strain of fighting against Ballas himself just minutes ago, and the mental stress inflicted on her as she was violently torn away from the people she had once been only left her even more fatigued. 

“I’m confused,” she said, struggling to keep coordinated and acclimate herself to the body she wore. “Who am I?”

“Margulis, forgive me. This is who you really are. A human, long imprisoned, long misled, but once a citizen of the Empire like any other. What do you remember?”

The woman struggled to make sense of the jumble of memories she had. “Words, images… none of it connected. I see planets… I know everything about Tau. It’s my home.”

“No… No, Margulis, it’s not. Those are false memories from your time enslaved by the Sentient. It was so many years before I found you, but I’ve got you back now.” Ballas helped the woman up to a sitting position, but she wavered when she tried to stand. A moment later the hilt of Paracesis was pressed into her hand, and she leaned on the sword like a cane as Ballas helped  her over to rest in the Lotus’s transmissions seat. 

“You’ve been so brave, my love.” Ballas stood in front of the woman and held her hand, then gently let it go. “Remember before, when we were together. The Seven wanted to destroy you, but I had a plan… I was going to get you out, but the Sentient came and stole you away. It used you, but now you’re free, and I will never let anyone take you away again.”

The woman’s eyebrows twitched downward ever so slightly, then her face returned to a dazed, emotionless state. She stared into the distance above Ballas’s left shoulder, but addressed him as if she was meeting his eyes. “I know, Ballas… You still care about me just how you did before. It’s been so long since I heard your voice.”

“I’ve lived a long time, Margulis. And I’ve been hurt by a lot of people. But even with all my scars, nothing ever compared to the pain of being alone, the pain of losing you. I don’t blame you for the things you said while under the machine’s control. You will be my companion for the rest of eternity, and one day even these past hundred years of pain will feel like the blink of an eye.”

The woman in the Lotus’s old body shook her head. “I’m not eternal like you,” she said. “I’m old, and weak, and blind.”

While Ballas offered words of reassurance, up above Margulis viewed the scene and struggled to contain her laughter. Breazeal looked at her in confusion and she explained, “I know what’s happened now. That person… she’s us. Both of us, because we both had part of ourselves in that body when it was cut off from us. Look at her, she’s not blind at all. We fixed those eyes a long time ago. She’s pretending to be who Ballas thinks she is. She’s bluffing, which is exactly what I would do in that situation, because she’s me!”

“You think so?” Breazeal peered through the camera to see for herself. Below, Ballas was talking, mainly about himself now that he judged his duty to act concerned for the woman he thought was Margulis to be complete. “Okay, you’re right, she’s not acting quite right to be who Ballas is saying she is. If she’s us, that means both halves of her must hate Ballas’s guts, but she’s managing to hold it together so far. She’s still got his sword within arm’s reach, but I doubt she’s in any fit state to use it right now. Wait, what’s…”

Breazeal looked closer, focusing not on Ballas but on the empty Stalker warframe behind him. Its hands were no longer clenched around the space where Paracesis had once been held. It was moving, slowly but surely, reaching down with one hand toward the broken War that lay nearby. The woman’s eyes flickered toward the warframe then quickly returned to look at a spot slightly off of Ballas’s face. 

The Stalker warframe turned, taking a single quiet step out of the position it had stood in. It placed one hand on the sword’s hilt and the other midway down the blade, gripping it lightly between thumb and fingertips to lift it straight up from the floor without making the slightest sound. It slowly adjusted its grip as Ballas finally finished his monologue to the one he was determined to call his love. 

“...and that’s why we’re destined to be together. Don’t you agree?”

The woman frowned and shook her head, finally letting some of her frustration show. “I don’t believe in destiny,” she said, staring Ballas directly in the eyes now, perhaps a little too forcefully. “The future isn’t written. Only people, with their choices, can write it.” She glanced behind Ballas again, her almost pure white eyes concealing the movement, to see the broken sword held ready in the Stalker’s hands. 

She continued, speaking suddenly in a much darker tone. “But I can tell you one thing, right now.” On this last word she shifted her gaze to the living warframe, and it understood her signal.

The Stalker stepped forward and put a hand on Ballas’s shoulder. His eyes widened and he whirled around, to be met with the point of the broken War sliding between his ribs. The woman in the chair jumped up and took Paracesis in hand, slamming its point down into Ballas’s back with all her might. “There is  _ no _ future where I would choose to be with  _ you _ ,” she snarled. 

Ballas’s head fell to look at the two swords stuck through his chest. “Oh…” he murmured as he sank to his knees. “You’re… not…”

“I’m not your lover,” the woman born of Margulis and her real partner sneered, as she wrenched Paracesis out of the Orokin’s flesh. 

A voice emanated from the Stalker warframe, a normal human voice without the distortion typically associated with its attacks. “And I’m not your friend.” He twisted his broken sword around to lay Ballas on his back, and then pulled it free. Both watched in silence as the two splotches of crimson showing through his clothes grew and merged. His glowing eyes fluttered and drifted shut, and Ballas breathed his last. 

Paracesis clattered to the floor as its wielder sat down hard into the control seat again. “Thank you,” the woman said, as the warframe she addressed discarded its weapon as well. “I don’t know who or what you are, but I’m glad I’m not the only one who saw this scum for what he is. Do you have a name? Other than, you know…”

The black warframe chuckled. “I have several,” he said. “The Tenno see me with this helmet and call me Stalker. Ballas, when he wasn’t sarcastically calling me ‘old friend’, made me wear different headgear and referred to me as Excalibur Umbra. But my true name and original helm, once upon a time… was Kivuli Dax.” He sat down cross-legged on the floor. “I was one of Ballas’s cruel experiments. He made me a Cephalon against my will, transformed my body into a warframe, then put me back when the process was complete. What about you? I’m guessing you’re not the Margulis he was always obsessing over.”

The woman looked pained. “Well… I might be, kind of? I  _ am _ Margulis, but… also not? I have a random assortment of her memories, enough to form a continuous trace from her to me. But the same can be said of Breazeal. I’m both of them, but also neither. I’m a Sentient, and a human who became a Sentient, but my body now is only human. I don’t know who or what I am either. Not that it’s really important. I shouldn’t even exist. The real Lotuses are probably just fine, and they’re the ones who matter, not me.”

“Of course you matter,” Kivuli said. “You’re alive, aren’t you? And you’ve done something in your first ten minutes that nobody else could accomplish in a century. Not that achievements are all that define a person, of course not, but sometimes it can be hard to see your own worth in any other way.”

“I am alive, yes, but…” The woman sighed heavily. “The real Margulis and Breazeal are alive too. There’s no way all of them got put into me. I’m just an extra, made by mistake.” She looked down at Ballas, laying in a pool of his own blood. “Spite got me this far, but that purpose is over with now. I don’t want to get in the Lotus’s way.” She shifted her weight in the chair and turned to run her hand over the control panel to one side. 

Kivuli leapt to his feet and stepped over Ballas’s body to grab her wrist. “Oh, no you don’t. You are  _ not _ blowing up this ship with yourself onboard. Come on now, let’s step away from the buttons…” He gently tugged at her hand until she stood up and reluctantly came with him. They both took a seat on the floor, leaning back against the outer wall. At the top of the room, the Lotus’s viewpoint swiveled to track them. 

“Why are you so concerned about me? You could just leave. Live your own life, free of Ballas.”

“So could you,” the warframe responded. “We’ve both been given new life today. We both carry memories of another time, before we became what we are today. All people have a right to life, and aren’t we people? Let’s take this life we’ve been given and live it to the fullest.”

“Doing what? All the good I’ve done is someone else now. As a human I’m so limited, I can’t even pick up where the real versions of me left off. I don’t have any of the tools or abilities that they do. And if I’m not doing good in the world, then what  _ am _ I doing? What’s the point?”

“You don’t have to have some grand purpose. I don’t think I ever did. I joined the Dax because my family was dirt poor and it provided a good income. It was peacetime then, it’s not like I volunteered because I wanted to uphold Orokin principles or anything. I got assigned as a bodyguard and shuffled around to one Orokin after another until Ballas took a liking to me, and I stayed with him until the war came and they wanted me to fight. In all likelihood I’ve done more evil in my life than good, plus a whole lot of things that wouldn’t count as either. But in between all the major history I’ve lived through… I raised a son. I had a family who I cared about, who I provided for as best I could. And that was always so much more important to me than any purpose or duty or service to something bigger.”

The woman threw up her hands in exasperation. “Isn’t that exactly what I was saying? I can’t do what I’ve been doing for the past century and a quarter anymore. I can’t guide the Tenno the way I should be able to. The difference between us is that I can’t bring myself to do anything else. If I just left, it would feel like betraying the Tenno and all the people the Lotus has helped over the years. Better to be nothing than be a disappointment.”

The two sat in silent contemplation for a minute, until finally Kivuli said simply, “Would your parents want you to be nothing, to not exist?”

“My what?”

“That’s what they are, isn’t it? The two halves of the Lotus? What is a child, except a combination of random traits from two other people? And human kids get made by mistake all the time. Don’t think of Margulis and the Sentient as the original you, or the superior you, or the more real you. They’re your parents. And if I know anything about the Lotus, it’s that they want  _ everyone _ to have a long, happy life. Even you.”

The human sighed again. “But…” She trailed off, unable to even complete the thought. 

“Who cares where you came from or who you used to be? Good or bad, it’s all behind you. What matters is what you do going forward.”

The woman’s eyes went wide and she started at the warframe sitting next to her. “That’s what I said to Breazeal once – what Margulis said. About being a Sentient fighting to protect humanity. But…” A smile slowly spread across her face as the realization came over her. “But I  _ am _ Breazeal. Margulis said that to me, and I trust what Margulis says because she is me. Maybe I  _ can _ just… live.”

“There you go!” Kivuli clapped a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eyes. Even through his expressionless warframe face, she could tell that internally he was beaming with pride. “You’re starting to think a little higher of yourself. You don’t have to be literally made from two people who love each other to know you have worth, but it can’t hurt, right? Now, since we’re looking forward… how about we get you a name?”

“Hmm… Well, I can’t call myself Margulis or Breazeal. Lotus would be accurate, but that would just be confusing to people.”

“Is there anything else that refers to them that they wouldn’t use for themselves, so it could be free for you instead?”

“Betrayer-Queen? No thanks.” The Lotus’s daughter thought back to an age ago, before her parents had even met. “Margulis had another name once,” she said. “The high Orokin go by a single name only, but everyone else has two. Margulis was her family name, but when she achieved the title of Archimedean that’s what everyone began calling her, and especially when she became close with Ballas and the other Orokin it just stuck. But originally… her name was Valerie.”

“Valerie Margulis… that’s a pretty name. Is that what you want to be called?”

“I’m not sure.” She rested her chin in her hands. “It’s nice, but it feels too one-sided. Maybe I should just go with Lotus? Or something similar… another flower? Sarracenia? No, pretty name but the flower itself is disgusting. What about Lily? Short, simple, water lilies look like lotuses but are not…” She looked to Kivuli but he said nothing which might sway her decision. “I think I like it.”

Kivuli stood up and extended a hand to Lily to help her to her feet as well. “Congratulations, Lily. You’re a person. Now you can try to figure out what that means to you.”

“How are you so good at this?” Lily asked. “A little while ago I was ready to kill Ballas and then myself, but now… I’m happy having only killed Ballas.”

Kivuli shrugged. “Dad skills.” 

Lily smiled at him, then threw her arms around the warframe. “Thanks, Kivuli.” She let go and wandered over to stand in front of Ballas again, then turned back. “Will you stay with me?” she asked. “At least for a while, until I’m okay to be on my own?”

“Of course. My ship should still be docked here, and I’ve watched Ballas use my body to fly it for long enough that I can do it myself now. No Cephalon, I’m afraid. Ballas didn’t trust them not to betray him, even with precepts he programmed himself.”

Lily laughed. “Was there  _ anyone _ who didn’t hate him? Also, now that I think of it, we should take the body with us. You never want to turn your back on an Orokin Executor, no matter how dead you think they are.”

“Good point. I’ll grab him, you take the swords. They’re both pretty special and you never know when we might want one again.” Kivuli leaned down to grab Ballas under the arms, and slung the dead man over his shoulder. Lily tiptoed around the rather large pool of blood to carefully pick up Paracesis and the broken War. She gave each of them a quick shake to get some of the liquid off, but they would both need a serious cleaning later. 

After one last glance around the room, the pair walked together to the doorway and set off toward Kivuli’s ship. Drips of Orokin blood spattered the floor as they went, and halfway down the long hallway Lily asked, “Do you know why Ballas was like that? His body, I mean. His personality was always like that.”

“He’s been gray for a long time, since shortly after he turned me into this. Giving me commands via kuva wasn’t enough control for him. He studied the Transference experts’ work and figured out a way to hijack my body like a Tenno would. He never had the Void powers, but he did get himself into a warframe. But even that wasn’t enough.”

Kivuli stopped to shift the weight onto his other shoulder. “Ballas didn’t like having to leave his physical body in a somatic link. That was a weakness that he couldn’t tolerate. Now that I’ve been taken along for the ride while he and Hunhow exposed the Tenno Reservoir, I understand why he was so insistent that he not have one of his own. He was confident he could fight off any attacker, but he needed to be awake. He experimented for years, and eventually succeeded in effectively transforming himself into his own living Transference pod. Look at his hair. It’s power cables.”

Lily hung back a few paces to get another look, and saw that what Kivuli described was true. “Wow… what about the arm? And the Sentient legs?”

“The long right arm was a failed experiment before he got Transference working. The robot legs, though… that one’s a bit more mundane. Ballas stepped in a hole one day and broke his ankle. So, given his typical Orokin mentality of replacing things at the slightest inconvenience rather than putting in the effort to repair, he brought out an old broken Lotus drone that he’d held onto as a trophy for who knows how long, and spent the next month transforming it into what you see here.”

They reached the airlock doors, the barrier on the Lotus side still held open from when Ballas overrode its software. Kivuli maneuvered himself sideways up next to the keypad on the other ship and carefully punched in the code that would open the door, still holding Ballas with one arm throughout the process. The door slid open and Lily shut the other side behind her before she followed Kivuli into the ship. 

The magnetic clamps shut off and allowed the two to separate, and the engines of both ships kicked on to carry them away from Lua orbit. The Lotus flew their now empty vessel forward along Earth’s orbit to meet up with the reinforcements that had not arrived soon enough, while simultaneously managing minor conflicts all across the solar system as they were accustomed to doing, all the battles they had been abruptly knocked out of before. 

“So… what now?” Margulis relaxed her control of the many robotic bodies she wore to turn to her wife in their shared headspace. 

“Business as usual, I guess,” Breazeal replied. “I really like that Kivuli guy though. If I ever get a chance to meet him myself, I want to thank him for everything he did today.”

“Me too. I’ll admit, seeing Lily is kind of disconcerting, but I am glad she’s alive. It presents a bit of a problem for our messages to the Tenno though. We’ve got enough prerecorded segments to cover most standard missions, but there’s a lot more going on right now than that sort of work.”

“Hmm…” Breazeal lowered the transmission camera to its usual spot, facing a now-empty chair. “We could just do audio only from now on? Or send a video of nothing?”

“Could we simulate a fake version of the biolyst talking? Just… entirely fabricate the video component while we talk over it in real time? I don’t know how hard that would be to do, but maybe?”

Breazeal considered the idea. “It’s doable,” she said finally, “but it would take a while to get it set up right. I believe we’ve got detailed scans of the biolyst around somewhere, but translating them into a realistic image may be difficult. I can rig up a basic outline in minutes, but anyone seeing it could tell it’s a fake.”

“We’ve got to tell the Tenno what happened anyway. Set it up while I plan out what to say.” Margulis mentally reviewed what she had already told the Tenno about Lua’s return and the threat of Hunhow’s reappearance. Not much more was necessary on that front, but news of the Stalker needed to be spread. 

A short while later, Breazeal stood up from her headspace seat and turned to the empty space behind the pilots’ area. She waved her hand and a glowing outline of the body that had once belonged to Margulis took shape. “Here you go,” she declared. “One very low quality, hastily made hologram of the biolyst.”

“…It’s purple.”

“Yep! So it is. Is that a problem?” 

“Um, I mean… no? I guess not,” Margulis stammered. “If it’s going to be obvious anyway…” 

“Just what I was thinking. I’m going to layer it over the camera feed of the empty chair so at least the background is familiar. You ready?”

Margulis nodded, and habitually reached for the biolyst controls which were no longer there. All she had to do was broadcast the words with her thoughts now, on a private channel which would be combined with the hologram during transmission. 

“Tenno! Apologies for the interruption earlier. The Stalker invaded my ship to attack me personally, but now the danger has passed. The evil that controlled that rogue warframe has been destroyed, and I can say with confidence that the Stalker will never trouble you again. However, during the struggle my own human body was also lost. I am unharmed but my transmissions have been inconvenienced, hence the hologram you see in this message. I expect this to return to a normal appearance within a matter of days to weeks. 

“Continue to defend Lua from all threats. If you require assistance in fighting Hunhow’s drones, do not hesitate to ask. Simply activate the Void beacon installed in your warframe and send me a message, and the Lotus will fight alongside you. That is all for now, Tenno. Fight well, fight honorably, but above all be safe.”


	3. Sepulcher Prologue

Margulis sighed heavily. As was normal for each member of the Lotus, she was currently involved in half a dozen missions simultaneously across the solar system, but she was finding it hard to concentrate on any of them. In her sparring match with a squad of Tenno on Lua, she felt sluggish and she was worried she might be giving them the wrong impression about what it would be like to fight Hunhow. 

A soft presence touched her mind. “Is everything okay?” her wife asked. “You seem a little off. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not really…” Margulis mumbled. “It’s nothing. I’ll be fine.”

“It’s clearly not nothing.” Breazeal pulled some of her attention away from the missions she was guiding and put a virtual arm around Margulis. “Even if you’ll be fine later, you’re not fine now. What is it?”

The former human laid her head on Breazeal’s shoulder. “It’s Lily,” she said. “I’m okay with her, you know, existing, but… I don’t know, it just seems…” She slowly let out a long breath of air. “I would have liked to have been consulted first, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that. She kind of weirds me out a little too. Seeing another me out there… Although, Kivuli was right. We should think of her as a child as well, not a copy or a fragment.”

“Either way, we didn’t get a say in it. She took a part of us with her, and it’s never coming back. But it’s not even really _about_ her, or not completely anyway.” Margulis snuggled closer to her partner. “I don’t know why I’m thinking like this. It doesn’t make sense. I hardly even used the biolyst. There was a while where things were so peaceful out there, all our missions were going according to plan, that we even put it away in cryostorage. It’s not like I was ever going to actually live in it full time again. But still… that was my last real connection to humanity, and now I’ve lost it.”

Breazeal pursed her lips and nodded. “Bodily, yes, but that’s not all there is. Socially we’re both more human than Sentient. We live here in the Origin System, we have the Tenno… you still go to that synagogue on Venus, right? You have plenty of active, meaningful human connections.”

“No, stop, that’s not it. Well, maybe it is, I don’t know. I just feel weird and bad and I’m not sure how to make it stop. I just want to get back to normal.”

Breazeal was silent for a while. “I don’t really know what to say,” she finally admitted. “Except that whatever happens next, we’ll get through it together. This is our new normal, and it will just take a bit of time to adjust.” She paused to consider her words, and then asked, “Do you think we should talk to Lily directly? Would that help or make things worse?”

“I don’t think so. I’m sure she’s got her own issues and I’d rather meet when all three of us are in a better state of mind. Besides, remember what your mother said to us when I first met her – when you first met her as yourself instead of the old you. Lily will find us when she’s ready. All we have to do is accept her when she comes.”

“And we will,” Breazeal said. “It’s funny, even though I’m well over the age when my parents’ and grandparents’ generations made their first children, I never really thought about it for myself. I waited so long, the decision was made for me.”

Now it was Margulis’s turn to fall silent. After a long minute leaning against her partner, she spoke up again, saying simply, “I did.” At Breazeal’s inquisitive look, she continued, “I’ve thought about having kids. But I always got the impression you weren’t that interested, and we’re basically mothers to the Tenno, so…”

“I would have been okay either way. But now that Lily is here, of course I’ll do everything I can to protect her. Even though she’d probably resent the implication that she needs protecting. Because, well… I know I would.”

“...You know, I think you might have just hit on one of the core issues for me.” Margulis looked at her partner with wonder. “I couldn’t really articulate it before, but – I always thought our children would be Sentients. That’s it. She seems so small and helpless as a human. I remember what it was like, being confined, being vulnerable…” 

She stopped as the memory of another’s words came rushing into her mind. “That’s exactly what Sylfe said to me this morning. The Tenno and I, we both used to be vulnerable but now we’re strong, and we use our power to protect those who didn’t get the same privilege. The same idea in different ways, and I feel like I’ve already failed at it once. Our daughter is only alive thanks to Kivuli, not because of anything we did to protect her.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” Breazeal said, trying to comfort her. “It’s not your fault. It all worked out in the end, and I think she’ll be okay from now on.”

“I’d still feel better if she was a Sentient,” Margulis grumbled. “We’re practically indestructible. Only one Sentient has ever died from any cause, assuming no tragedies at Tau while we’ve been away, and that was such a fluke.”

“Yeah, about that…” Breazeal sat up straighter, and Margulis stopped leaning on her shoulder and listened with interest to her partner’s words. “I may actually have a crazy idea. Not for making Lily a Sentient – that’s up to her to decide, and it would be easy to do if she wants it. But what if… we could try to bring Gantus back?”

“Oh? Now that _is_ a wild suggestion.” Margulis was impressed. “Normally it’s me who comes up with that sort of weird plan, just insane enough to be worth a try.” She let out a joking faux sigh. “You robots, stealing humans’ jobs for forty-seven thousand years…”

“And whose fault is that?” Breazeal laughed. “We were _made_ to do things that humans wanted to avoid. Being sentient just means we get to make fun of the humans while we do it. But hear me out here: none of Gantus’s pieces are actually _gone_ , ze’s just broken. It’s just like us and Lily, a unified mind spread over a large area which was suddenly torn apart, except in Gantus’s case ze ended up in so many pieces that none of them individually are still conscious. If we collected all the eidolons and brought them back together, I bet they might recombine. In fact, I think that’s literally what the Ostrons believe would happen, and they’ve lived with the eidolons at their gates for eighty years so I’d be inclined to listen.”

“Plausible, I’ll give you that,” Margulis said, now pondering the scheme and giving herself a much-needed distraction from the emotional turmoil. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to really test if that’s the case without committing all the way. What if the eidolons come together into a beast with all the power of Gantus but none of zer mind? We’d never be able to stop zem.”

“When have we ever tested any of your ideas before jumping in headfirst? I willingly entered the Void based on nothing but your speculation. Let’s just grab two teralysts and see what happens.”

“It takes a dedicated squad of well-prepared Tenno to capture a single eidolon intact. Even if everything goes perfectly it would take a lot of time and effort, and nothing ever goes perfectly. The Unum would never allow it.”

“How many eidolons have the Tenno already captured, just during their normal duties defending Cetus?” Breazeal countered. “How many have we airlifted to other parts of Earth and dropped off on some uninhabited shoreline? They never attack the wildlife. It will be fine if we do everything far away from Cetus.”

Margulis shook her head. “No, I think it’s still too dangerous. We can ask the Unum but I bet it will say the same. No bringing eidolons together without some guaranteed way of containing them again if things go badly.” A pensive look came across her face. “You know, the Grineer used to be builders. Now all they do is make war, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re still very good builders…”

“I know that tone. What are you getting at?”

“The Grineer can help us. Not willingly, and not directly, no matter how much the eidolons threaten their own operation near Cetus. But they’ve nearly finished construction on their latest Balor Fomorian meant to assault our Relays. Call off the sabotage. We’re not going to destroy this one… we’re going to steal it. _That_ can be our insurance plan in case the eidolons get out of control.”

“Brilliant.” Breazeal grinned at her partner, overcome with admiration. “See, you still have a job with the crazy ideas department after all. Let’s do it.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Lily… do you know anything about the Red Veil?” The black warframe asked his traveling companion without looking away from the ship controls. He wore the typical Excalibur Prime head now instead of the Stalker gear that Ballas had put on him, and the last bits of Hunhow’s Pakal ornamentation were being replaced with his original gold inlays by Lily’s deft hands as he spoke. 

“Yeah, they’re one of the syndicates the Tenno work with sometimes,” the human replied. “Why do you ask?”

“The Tenno work with them?” Kivuli was astonished. “After everything they’ve done? Do they know?” He spun his chair around suddenly to face Lily, inadvertently pulling the bit of metal she was working on out of her hands. 

“Know what? I know the Red Veil kidnapped a Tenno once, but we got Rell back and we didn’t hear anything further from them for a long time. When they resurfaced, they had a different leader and the group seemed a lot more reasonable. Still weird and pretty violent, but they didn’t seem to be doing anything overtly evil.”

“Then I believe the Lotus and the Tenno have all been misled,” Kivuli said darkly. “Did you know the Red Veil took orders from Ballas?”

“What?!” Lily stared, mouth agape, at Ballas’s former slave. “How? What did he want with them?”

“It wasn’t much in recent years, but during the Old War and for a while afterwards, he kept in contact with them regularly. I wouldn’t be surprised if he founded the group. Ballas was _terrified_ of the Void and anything that came from it. He told me stories of the Lord of Hell who lurked and listened within every wall, who only revealed himself to the Tenno demons. The Red Veil were supposed to stop this thing… through human sacrifice. They wanted a Tenno but they could never hold onto one for long.”

“Go on…” Lily listened as she circled the warframe, snapping more bits of gold into place. 

“Well, Ballas got fed up with their failures and ordered them to take someone who was not a Tenno. I remember like it was yesterday. I feel like even if I forgot the rest of my entire life, that one day would stick, that single burning memory that I could never let go of. When the Red Veil took my son.”

A piece of elegant Orokin decoration slipped from Lily’s hands and clinked on the floor of the ship. 

“It’s been a hundred years and there are many days when I don’t dare think that he might still be alive… but then there are those days when I can’t help but hold out hope. I’ve lived this long myself through the same man’s treachery, so maybe Isaah is still out there too. I want to find him, or at least find out what happened to him.”

“I can help.” Lily’s resolute tone came as a welcome change from the uncertainty and doubt that had plagued her since her creation. “I may not have access to the Lotus’s data archives anymore, but I keep discovering I know things that I didn’t realize I knew before. They must have stored copies of more information in here than I thought, and it’s just taking a little while to become available to me. Unfortunately, information on the Red Veil’s headquarters is not something I remember yet, but I know where we can find it. Can you call a Tenno? Doesn’t matter who.”

Kivuli powered up the long-range scanners and cast about for familiar ship signatures nearby. Several Tenno ships already orbited the moon, but their owners were likely already down below. Just like during his time as the Stalker, he needed to see a Tenno just arriving, only this time he would not be following them into their mission. 

It didn’t take long for a new squad of Tenno to arrive: two Lisets and a Xiphos flying in formation, coming to assist in the defense of the Reservoirs. Kivuli brought his ship around to intercept the group and hailed the ship in front. 

“Tenno, do you have a moment?” The broadcast camera showed Kivuli as a normal Excalibur Prime now, and Lily stepped off to the side to stay out of view. 

The green and gold Liset broke off from the others and took up position next to Kivuli’s orbiter. A Frost appeared on the other end of the connection. “What do you need? You want to join our squad here?”

“No, no, I’ve got my own mission at the moment. I was just wondering if you could tell me how to contact the Red Veil.”

The Tenno laughed at him. “The Red Veil? Man, those guys _hate_ me. I spend too much time with the Arbiters. Would you believe, they even sent a squad of special infested thingies to kill me?” 

Kivuli recoiled in disgust. “Infested? That sounds even worse than when I knew them before.”

“Yeah, it was some nasty energy-absorbing mutation too. Anyway, I got to catch up with my squad. Sorry I can’t help.”

“Wait,” Lily called out, before the Frost disappeared from the screen. “What about Steel Meridian? If you have it, we’ll take a contact for them instead.”

The Tenno glanced off to the side, then back toward his camera in confusion. “Lotus? That you?” He looked over to his left again, then shrugged and began typing a text message to send to the other ship. 

“Just my friend Lily. People tell her she sounds like the Lotus all the time.” Kivuli read off the string of numbers that appeared at the bottom of his viewport to confirm what the Tenno had sent him. “This is the frequency Steel Meridian listen on? Thanks. Good luck with your mission down there.” 

Both warframes reached out to close the connection at once, only an instant of static appearing on Kivuli’s screen before his end was also silenced. “So, how does Steel Meridian help us? They’re the Grineer defectors, right?”

“Some of them,” Lily clarified. “They’re the defectors who want to fight back. There are others like the Kavor who just want a peaceful life. What’s important to us is that they’re allied with the Red Veil. Call them up, I’ll get us what we need.”

The pair swapped places so Lily now sat in the pilot’s seat while Kivuli loitered off to the side. She typed in the numbers the Tenno had supplied them and sent out a standard greeting message, set to repeat once each minute until it was answered. 

She didn’t have long to wait, as a weathered Grineer face came up on her screen not long after the first call went out. “You’ve reached Steel Meridian,” he said. “What business do you…” The man did a double take. “Lotus? I’m sorry, I almost didn’t recognize you. Never seen you without the mask before. What can we do for you?”

“Is Cressa Tal there?” Lily asked, not disputing the assertion that she was the Lotus. “I need to speak with her. I have just found out something which she needs to know as soon as she’s available.”

“I’m sorry, Cressa is out on a mission at the moment, and she’s not expected back for several days. You can leave a message with me and I’ll make sure it gets to her.”

Lily frowned. “No, that won’t do. I can just call back later. Say, do you happen to have a direct line to Palladino at the Red Veil? I’ll need to speak with her as well.”

“I believe Cressa does, but I’m not privy to that information. Would you like a general contact for the Red Veil instead?”

“Yes, please.” A new string of digits appeared at the bottom of Lily’s screen. “Thank you for your time. You have nothing to worry about; I will sort things out with the syndicate leaders.” She gave a quick nod to the Grineer and shut off the transmitter. Turning to Kivuli, she said, “There we go, contact info for the people who stole your son. Want me to call them now, or do you need a moment to think first?”

Kivuli just stared at her. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “You just pulled rank, which you don’t have, offering up information, _which you don’t have_ , and got exactly what we needed. How do you _do_ that?”

“And the best part is, I did it without telling a single lie.” Lily wore a smug, satisfied grin. “Margulis was always great at bluffing, and she taught me everything she knew.”

“Sounds like you’re feeling better about the whole situation there. That’s good to hear. Now, I know you said you just needed a little bit here to get on your feet, but you’re welcome to stick with me as long as you want. I think we’d make a good team.” 

Kivuli offered a hand, and Lily took it without hesitation. “Sounds good to me,” she said. “We’ll find your son, and after that, who knows? Let’s just take things one day at a time and enjoy the life we’ve got.”


	4. The Blight Within, part 1

In deep space, floating among the Trojan asteroid cluster that co-orbited behind Jupiter, a beast lay hidden, ready to awaken. A giant with a searing eye that burned everything it looked upon to ash: the latest in the series of Balor Fomorians built to assault the Tenno’s gathering places. But this time there would be no Tenno Dé Danann, no Lugh casting his spear into the laser cannon… for this Balor was not meant to die. 

Nearby, better hidden within the rocky crevasses of several asteroids, oculysts scanned the beast and the swarm of Grineer ships and equipment surrounding it. The Lotus watched, and waited, already composing the message that they would send out to the Tenno when the time was right. 

And just like that, the crowd dispersed. The enormous oblong ship lit up with red, vertical lines down each side then the clusters of smaller lights in between, the twin engines lower down, and finally the terrible eye itself. The Fomorian shuddered and drifted forward, and its laser cannon focused on an asteroid in front of it. The light in the ship’s center grew brighter over the course of a few seconds, then a wide beam lanced out and obliterated the rock, leaving nothing but a diffuse cloud of glowing ions in its place. The laser rotated to target another asteroid as the construction ships around the Fomorian scattered out of the way. 

A radio transmission battered the sensors of everyone in a wide radius, the sound of a man whose voice had only two volume settings: loud and louder. “The might of the Grineer has returned! Those Tenno insects in their hives are no match for my FOMORIAN FLEET! Let them come, in their  _ puny _ little shells, in their Archwings! Fomorian commander, you will CRUSH these maggots into  _ dust _ and I will sprinkle their remains OVER MY BREAKFAST! Do not disappoint me again, Grineer! Show those worms at Saturn what it feels like to FAIL!”

With that inspiring speech from Councilor Vay Hek, the giant warship set off toward its target, the Kronia Relay. The Lotus’s drones stayed in place even as it retreated from scanning range, preferring to keep hidden until the Grineer construction apparatus had been fully dismantled and taken away. But throughout the solar system, a message was sent to the inboxes of every Tenno. 

“ **All Hands: Incoming Fomorian.** Vay Hek is making a move again. We have just detected a Balor Fomorian traveling on an interception course with a Relay. The beast moves slowly but if we allow it to get within firing range, it will surely obliterate our Relay. We need to stop it before that happens. 

“The Balor Fomorian’s power core emits a thick energy field composed of deadly omega radiation. In order to break through the field you will need to craft this Fomorian Disruptor. It will allow you to safely approach the Fomorian. Take note, Tenno: the Disruptor is forged using omega isotopes. These are a byproduct of a Fomorian’s core and can be most readily found on the moons of Saturn as the beast approaches. 

“However, Tenno, this is not the sabotage mission that you have carried out when a Fomorian has threatened us before. Craft the Disruptors to shield yourselves but do not use them to strike at the Fomorian’s core itself. This time, we intend to hijack the ship and turn it toward our own ends. All clans which possess a Railjack class ship should deploy it. For those who do not have this capability, I have a different mission for you which I will describe in the following message.”

Those words, along with a copy of the Fomorian Disruptor blueprint, were distributed to the orbiters of every Tenno. A moment later, the other member of the Lotus sent out her own call to action, talking about the other half of the operation they wished to undertake. 

“ **A Mission Of Mercy.** For too long, Cetus has suffered attacks from the Grineer by day and the terrifying eidolons by night. The Tenno have done an admirable job of containing both threats, but I believe we can eliminate one of these dangers entirely. 

“Most know that the eidolons are fragments of a much larger being, a Sentient who fought and died in the Old War. Many also know that the eidolons do not fight out of malice; they have no desire to destroy Cetus or the Tenno. Their only goal is to find each other and become whole again, and the damage they cause is merely a wounded creature lashing out in pain. 

We can end their suffering. The Tenno know how to capture these eidolons intact, so we can give them what they want. With a captured Balor Fomorian to back us up in case things go horribly wrong, we can rebuild the Sentient, ending the eidolon threat and gaining a powerful new ally against the Grineer. All Tenno who are not working on the Fomorian and know how to capture the eidolons without killing them, please go to the plains and assist with this mission.”

Margulis finished dictating her message to the Tenno inboxes and turned to her partner. “You know, maybe we should have cleared this with the Unum  _ before _ we announced it to everyone,” she said. 

“Yeah… might want to do that now, before kids start showing up in droves looking to cage a piece of Gantus. You should make the call, not me. I’m pretty sure the Unum likes you better.” 

“I’ll get right on it.” Margulis shifted some of her focus into drones near Earth, to more easily interface with the tower below and the strange consciousness it housed. She began to reach outward to make contact, but a different data stream grabbed her attention first. 

“Hello, Lotus? It’s me, Carol.” The face of a Nyx warframe appeared on her virtual screen. “I just have some… questions… about these new missions. Okay, some issues, I suppose. Serious concerns, even. Can I just talk to you for a moment?”

Margulis called up the hologram to show to the girl while she spoke over it. “Of course!” To Breazeal she sent a quick note: “Can you take this? I should focus on the Unum.” She handed off the connection to the other Lotus. 

“So, Lotus, sorry to bother you, and I’m sure you’ve thought through all this a lot already, but I was just hoping you could help me understand why we’re doing this,” the Tenno said. 

“It’s no problem at all,” Breazeal replied. “I encourage everyone to question your orders if you don’t agree with them. Do you mind if I put you on speakerphone, so to speak? I’m sure there are other Tenno with the same questions who could benefit from our discussion.”

“Uh, go ahead, I guess?” Carol’s voice wavered but she pushed through the anxiety, pretending that since she couldn’t see or hear the thousands of other Tenno that they couldn’t hear her either. Once her permission was given, Breazeal opened new channels to all Tenno at once, as she customarily did to warn them of time-limited missions. 

“So, um… the eidolons are parts of a Sentient from the Old War. Isn’t that literally what you just warned us about the other day, a Sentient from the Old War that’s attacking Lua? Why should we help it?”

“Different Sentient. There were seven who fought back then,” Breazeal clarified. “Most of them were perfectly decent, it’s just Hunhow who’s a problem. In fact, that Nyx you’re currently using was originally designed by one of them and the blueprint given to me as a gift.” 

“But it’s still a Sentient!” the Tenno protested. “They destroyed the Orokin. How can we trust any of them not to just turn around and try to kill us as soon as it’s able to?”

“Carol… what do you remember of the Old War?” 

The Tenno cocked her head in confusion, but answered the Lotus’s question. “Not a lot, really,” she said. “It all kind of feels like a dream at this point. But I know I fought in it, and I know I was fighting Sentients.”

Breazeal manipulated the purple hologram to make it nod in understanding. “I should have woken you all up a long time ago, but until now you were safer on the moon,” she said. “There’s so much you’ve forgotten. Like the fact that I too am a Sentient.” She smiled to defuse the Tenno’s shock. “I’ve hardly made a secret of it. I coordinate dozens of missions at once and I never sleep. Sentient drones even fight alongside you when the Tenno get overwhelmed.”

“Okay, I… I guess not all Sentients are the same then. I know you’d never try to hurt us. But the eidolon one? We don’t know anything about them.”

“Gantus was one of my grandparents. Now, granted, that maybe doesn’t mean a lot since Hunhow is my father and he’s so horrible, but I did know Gantus well and I believe I can reason with zem once ze’s fully alive again. I expect all ze’ll really want to do is go home to the Tau system, and I can take zem there. But if not… well, that’s what the Fomorian is for. We’re stealing the most powerful ship in the solar system, because if anything can take down a hostile Sentient elder, that would be the thing to do it.”

“Oh. Um… okay.” The Nyx leaned back in silence for a moment. “Sorry, Lotus, this is just a lot to take in. But thank you for answering my questions like this. If you say it will be alright, then I trust you.”

“I’m glad I could clear things up for you. To all Tenno, please don’t hesitate to ask questions. I want you to do things because you believe it’s right, not just because someone tells you to. If you think your orders aren’t right, then by all means tell me so. I want to hear your thoughts.” 

Breazeal almost shut down the hologram and ended her transmission then but decided to add one last note. “Just to reiterate while I have everyone on the line: if you have a Railjack or are skilled with an Archwing, please prioritize the Fomorian. If you have experience capturing eidolons, then help with that and teach others if you can. Otherwise, continue to defend Lua and take up missions around the solar system as normal.”

She closed the connection to the Tenno. “You done?” her partner asked. “I’ve got news from Earth. Really learned something new today.”

“Oh? What is it?”

“Turns out it’s possible to surprise the Unum,” Margulis said. “I mean, she knew resurrecting Gantus was on the table, but she’d assigned a very low probability to it ever happening.”

“She?” Breazeal raised one eyebrow. 

“Yeah, apparently she wants to be gendered again these days, rather than going by it/its pronouns like she did before. Returning to her human roots maybe? Just when I’m leaving the last of my own roots behind. Anyway, she said the Fomorian should be enough insurance against a hostile Gantus, but she wants it placed under her direct control. No Tenno onboard, no connection to us.”

“Really? She drives a hard bargain.” Breazeal looked uneasy at the news. 

Margulis nodded. “The Unum believes that if Gantus does not come back the way we intend, or if ze does but is hostile – any case in which we have to fight zem – that there will only be a very short window of opportunity to use the Fomorian, before ze becomes uncontrollable. If it were our finger on the trigger, she thinks we would hesitate.”

“Honestly, she’s probably right,” Breazeal said with a shallow sigh. “You agreed to the terms, I assume?”

“I did. We just have to park the Fomorian in orbit over Earth and she’ll… do whatever it is that she does. I know better than to ask. Step one, of course, is making sure we actually get the Fomorian away from the Grineer. You think maybe we should take some drones in ourselves to help fight the surrounding fleet?”

Breazeal shrugged. “The Tenno have done this before, but it can’t hurt. And I have kind of missed using the heavy fighters. This will be a nice excuse to bring some out again… the ones we haven’t already scrapped, that is.” She mentally scanned over the entire Lotus arsenals, every ship and drone her mind could be connected to, most of them unused since the Old War. 

On a distant, tiny moon of Neptune, a rectangular section of the ground lifted and slid away, revealing a deep unlit chamber below. Heavy thuds vibrated through the soil, but the lack of an atmosphere negated any actual sound. One by one the Sentient machines stored below shuddered and came to life. Long lavender-painted spikes rose up in single file and spread out around the hole, settling down onto the dusty earth like obelisks. 

“I’ve got a whole storeroom full of akontiolysts,” Breazeal reported. “Not great for capturing the Balor alive since their main purpose is spearing into enemy ships to create vacuum breaches across multiple decks, but they might come in handy if the Grineer send backup.” 

She searched further, digging into long-dormant sections of the vast fleet she had once commanded. There were so many ingenious types of Sentient war drones which had lost their purpose after the fall of the Orokin, because the Grineer and the modern Corpus simply didn’t use the technologies that they had been specially adapted to counter. 

“Found a couple stemmalysts on Mercury that still work.” These were the common round design, a favorite which could still be seen littering the Plains of Eidolon. With their focus on ranged energy bolts and the ability to link together into chains or nets, a contingent of stemmalysts could be highly effective against even a much larger swarm of small enemies. Unfortunately, the Lotus no longer had enough of them to perform any advanced tactics. 

Over the years, as the two factions of Tenno united behind the Lotus and they took up their modern duties as protectors and peacekeepers, their arsenals had expanded considerably. Each individual Tenno now owned many warframes customized for different situations, and every one of them contained a small amount of exilus alloy sourced from the bodies of the Lotus themselves. The Sentient construction lent resilience to the frame and facilitated communication, and in an emergency the Tenno’s mother could even reforge the link and take physical control. 

Breazeal continued powering up drones around the solar system, then inserting her consciousness to examine their functionality from within. Most were in good working condition, with the notable exception of her two stashes on the surface of Eris. One vault had been overrun with infestation which had destroyed the lepidalysts held there, and the other was pristine within but its door had been covered in such a thick mass of cancerous growths that it could no longer be forced open. 

“Oh wow, I forgot I had otholysts,” Breazeal said with a chuckle. “Those were always so much fun. Sometimes the simplest solution to a problem can be the most effective. In this case, the problem is medium to large enemy ships in a tight formation, and the solution is a drone with no guns at all, only grappling clamps and oversized engines. You get up in between them and just shove ships into each other.” 

“I suppose that works,” Margulis replied, “though I was always more of a stemmalyst fan myself. Their tight formations won’t hold up so well when you slide a grid of laser beams over the whole group.”

“A Sentient classic. I really wish we’d kept more of these active. Battalysts and conculysts are nice because they’re warframe-sized, but there is still a need for space combat sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know…” Margulis searched through her own recollections of the Old War. “Hey, do we still have any ropalolysts? Those were always a nice hybrid, a mid-size fighter for ground or space, with both lasers and some physical strength. If we’re getting back into fighting personally again, I’d like at least one of them around.”

“I’ll build some out of all these extra akontiolysts. We certainly don’t need this many flying nails anymore. I hope you don’t mind taking over most of mission control for a while. I’m going to be busy.”

* * *

 

 

Kivuli nervously typed a long string of numbers into the keypad below his viewscreen at the front of his ship. He glanced down after each one to make sure it matched the list on the paper Lily had written for him, then went back once more at the end to confirm it all again. And finally, when all was checked and rechecked until there was no possible doubt about the code’s veracity, still Kivuli hesitated. 

After more than a hundred years, he was so close. On the other end of this line were the people who had taken his son… or worse, the people who had idly stood by and accepted his son after Ballas had taken him. They could have disobeyed their Orokin master. They could have fought back and done what was right. Even if Kivuli had been compelled through his Dax oath to fight with Ballas, the Red Veil together could have defeated them and saved his son. 

But they didn’t. These madmen wanted to fight the Void itself, and in their hubris they truly believed they could defeat it. They wanted a vessel that they could hollow out and use to contain their so-called Indifference, and Isaah was their sacrifice. 

A gentle hand came to rest on his shoulder. “Ready?” Lily asked. “It will be okay. Remember the plan.”

“I’m not so sure the plan will work,” Kivuli replied. “Sure, I can pose as a Tenno easily, but would they let a Tenno into their main base? I don’t think so.”

“But a Tenno accompanying the Lotus as a bodyguard, that’s much more likely. Would you like me to make the call instead?”

“No, I’ll do it. I just think we need to be more upfront. Say some things they can’t ignore. Bluff about how much we know, not about who we are.” Kivuli’s hand drifted to the enter button, and he waved Lily out of view of the camera. 

He pressed the button, and his signal was beamed out on the Red Veil frequency. Moments later, a cowled face appeared on the screen. “What is it you require, Tenno?” the red-clothed man questioned flatly. 

Kivuli hesitated a brief moment, then responded, “I need to speak to Palladino.”

The Red Veil operative’s face was mostly hidden in shadow, but Kivuli could make out a slight twitch of the eyebrow before the man’s impersonal mask returned. “The Holy Speaker of the Veil does not take visitations readily. Why should she accept you?”

“It’s about your syndicate’s holy mission,” Kivuli said. “And I don’t mean cleansing the solar system in blood and fire. Your other mission, what the Red Veil was founded for.” He paused a moment, but there was no reaction from the syndicate operative. “I need to speak with her about the Vessel.”

The hooded man was silent for a long time as he looked down, breaking eye contact with the camera. Finally he returned his gaze to Kivuli and said, “I will confer with our leader. If the Speaker accepts your request, you will hear from her.” With that, the transmission window went dark. 

Kivuli looked over to Lily, who was standing off to the side of the ship controls and the viewscreen. “Normal Tenno wouldn’t know about the Vessel, would they? Palladino will want to see us to find out how I know, and see if anyone else knows too.” 

“Or she might just send a platoon to assassinate us. You never know with syndicates… especially this one.”

Kivuli looked as sheepish as his warframe form allowed. “Right… the other method of dealing with someone who knows too much. I hadn’t thought about that.” He pulled up external views of the ship on his screen and nervously put one hand on Paracesis. 

His fears were allayed when another transmission came through, bringing up a new window over the external cameras. A person covered head to toe in thick red and black fabric, including over the face, sat in a sparsely decorated office with walls of gray stone spattered asymmetrically with more red. Whether this was paint or blood, Kivuli didn’t dare wonder. 

A woman’s voice came from the veiled figure. “I am Palladino, Speaker of the Veil. It seems we have much to discuss. Meet me at these coordinates.” A small file blinked in the bottom corner, and then the line went dead. 

“Well that’s not suspicious at all,” Lily said, the corner of her mouth turned down. “This could very easily be a trap. What if they want  _ you _ as a Vessel?”

But Kivuli was already bringing the ship out of its parking orbit over Lua and setting it on a course for Earth. “I have to find my son,” he said grimly. “And if it’s a trap, I’ll fight my way out. Remember, I’m not just a normal Excalibur. Ballas wanted to make sure his personal Stalker warframe was the best.” 

He stood up from the controls and made a quick motion with one hand. A burst of bluish smoke appeared around him, and when it dissipated Kivuli was gone. Eight seconds later he blinked back into view, still standing in the same spot. “I’m also an Ash,” he said. “And a Nyx, a Mag, a Rhino, even an Oberon. Whatever happens down there, I’ll be fine. You may want to stay behind, though. Mentally you may be both Lotuses at once, but bodily you’re just a human, with no weapons and no Void powers.”

Lily scoffed. “Not a chance. I’m coming with you.” 

“If you insist.” Kivuli shrugged. “Would I be correct in assuming that nothing I could possibly say would deter you anyway?” 

Lily nodded. “That’s right.” She stepped over to the navigation panel and examined the screen. “Looks like just a couple minutes before we arrive. I hope this goes well.” 

She moved aside and Kivuli took back the controls to navigate the landing craft down through Earth’s atmosphere. They passed over a large inland sea and Lily knew, though she had never been there as herself, that its northern shore was home to the Ostron people, the descendants of those who had not made the journey to Tau. Continuing westward, they came over a region named after one of the moons of Jupiter, if the ancient historians were to be believed, and the ship descended toward a heavily forested area near the middle of the continent. 

Kivuli slowed the ship to navigate carefully toward the coordinates they had been given, drifting over miles upon miles of unbroken forest. Finally a clearing appeared before them, right as the navigation systems declared they had arrived. There was a clearly marked landing pad on the edge of what looked to be a rather large town built entirely from the local wood. 

The landing craft docked safely and its two passengers stepped out into the cool air. As they walked across the landing pad, a pair of Grineer hurried toward them, armed but with their weapons not drawn. They relaxed upon seeing the black warframe, though uncertainty was still plain on their faces. 

“What brings you here, Tenno and human?” one asked. The other added, “We welcome you, but this enclave does not typically host visitors. Do you have business with Steel Meridian?”

“Steel Meridian? We’re actually here to see Palladino of the Red Veil.” Lily spoke the truth, seeing no need to deceive people she knew to be allies. “We followed the coordinates she gave us and that led us here. Are we in the right place?”

“You are. Palladino arrived not long ago. We are honored to have our ally syndicate’s leader in our midst. Climb down from here and cross the field, and you will find her in the auxiliary office on the far side.” With that, the Grineer pair turned to leave the way they had come, though one pointed toward a ladder off to one side which would take Lily and Kivuli to ground level. 

They followed the directions as well as they could, but every structure in this place looked alike and the central courtyard was not a regular shape. After a few moments of searching, hesitant to barge into anywhere they might not be welcome, Kivuli flagged down another passing Grineer to question him. 

“Excuse me, I’m looking for Palladino of the Red Veil. Do you know where she is?”

A single enthusiastic word came in response. “Clem!”

“I’m sorry, what was that? Could you point out the right building to me?”

“Clem.” The Grineer looked at Lily intently. “Grakata?”

“Uh, no thanks?” Lily took a step toward a random door nearby. “Is this where Palladino is?”

“Clem! Clem.” The Grineer moved to grab Lily’s arm, but she twisted out of the way. He motioned for the pair to follow, and turned toward a different building some thirty feet away. “Grakata, clem.” 

“Thanks, man.” Kivuli clapped the Grineer on the back and approached the doorway in front of them. He reached out for the curtain hanging across the entrance, but it was pulled aside by another hand. In the doorway stood the same figure they had seen in the brief video transmission earlier, a woman clothed in red and black with not an inch of skin showing anywhere on her body. 

“Welcome, holy child of the Zariman,” Palladino said. “And to you as well, great Sentient queen. Please, enter. You may leave your warframe at the door if you like; it is safe here.” The Red Veil leader walked down the short hallway into a well-lit office at the end, and took a seat at a round table, and Lily and Kivuli followed. 

No one else was present, neither Grineer nor Red Veil operatives. Lily breathed a quiet sigh of relief at the sight. With no apparent danger, the likelihood of this meeting being a trap was significantly lowered. The pair sat in unison across from the veiled woman. 

“Given the uncertainty of the situation I thought it best to meet on neutral ground. But I am curious, child…” Palladino began. “What do you know of this Vessel you spoke of to my agent? How did you come upon this information about our holy order?”

“I know more than you’d probably like me to,” Kivuli said. “I know you’re using him as a human sacrifice, as bait for the Indifference. I know you’ve tortured him and hung him from the ceiling.” His voice grew darker with every word until it was almost a snarl. “I know his name is Isaah.” 

Palladino looked rather taken aback, and she took a moment to collect her thoughts before responding. “Well, you’re certainly well informed, though there is one important fact you appear to be lacking. How does a Tenno like yourself learn these things?”

“Directly from your master,” Kivuli growled. “That Orokin bastard, Ballas. I was… uncomfortably close with him, for a long time. He told me all about your group.”

“I haven’t spoken to Ballas in years,” Palladino said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “How is he?” she inquired. 

“Dead. By my hand, and hers.” Kivuli curled one hand into a fist. “I’m not a Tenno, you know. There’s no Transference here. I am a living warframe, Ballas’s slave, but I was human once… and Ballas’s slave then as well. I had a son. A son named  _ Isaah. _ ”

Palladino’s face was invisible behind her thick veil, but she jerked back in her chair in obvious surprise. “What?! You’re… that’s impossible. The Vessel’s father…” She held up both hands in a nonthreatening gesture. “Let me explain. You know what the Indifference is, right? And why it’s so important to keep its influence contained?”

“Don’t give me that shit.” Kivuli leaned forward over the table. “I want you to take me to my son, and let him go free.” Next to him Lily looked on with discomfort, but she stayed out of the confrontation. Her brows furrowed as she tried to recall anything of relevance about the entity the Red Veil called the Indifference. 

“Ah, well, um… there’s something you should know.” Palladino slid her chair back a few inches. “We, uh, the whole Red Veil, I mean, we don’t… there’s no Vessel anymore. I’m afraid your son is dead.”

“You fanatics killed him!” Kivuli grabbed the edge of the table with both hands and lifted it as he stood up, tossing it effortlessly aside to crack against the wall. Palladino and Lily jumped to their feet as well as ripples of energy began to swirl around his hands and arms. “You can’t fight the Void!” he yelled. “And you certainly can’t accomplish anything useful by  _ murdering my son! _ ”

Kivuli threw one hand forward and the energy in him surged, lifting Palladino into the air to struggle helplessly, unable to reach any solid surface to ground herself. “Please, it was a long time ago,” she whimpered. “We don’t do that anymore. There’s no one else.”

The black warframe’s anger still raged, undiminished. He drew his chromatic exalted blade, the metal sparking with electricity, and in the same fluid motion he vanished, appearing instantly in the space behind the Red Veil leader. He grabbed the back of her robes as the Reckoning wore off and she dropped to the floor, hauling her upright and placing his crackling sword to her neck. 

“I never knew the Vessel,” Palladino cried. “I’m only twenty-six years old! My mother, the Speaker before me, even she never knew him!”

Lily moved quickly to grab her companion’s wrist. “Kivuli, stop this! No one needs to die today.” The warframe glared at her, but relaxed his grip on Palladino slightly. “We knew it was a slim chance Isaah would still be alive. The ones responsible are already long gone. There’s nothing to be gained from taking out your anger on her.”

Kivuli lowered his sword and shoved the veiled woman away from him as he sheathed it. “Fine. But  _ someone _ needs to pay for all that needless suffering.”

“Ballas already has. He was the one truly responsible for your son’s death, and he got what he deserved.” Turning her attention to Palladino, Lily asked, “You said there’s no Vessel now? After Isaah died you didn’t replace him?”

The Speaker lowered her hand from where she had been gently massaging her throat through her veil. “That’s right,” she answered, her voice hoarse. “The Indifference has not been sighted since our Vessel first ascended, even after the seal was broken. With luck, the Void terror contained within died with him. The Red Veil has entered a new age. We have a new holy mission. We work with the Tenno now, to purge the system of all the lingering evil that still plagues it.”

Palladino turned a chair around to face her visitors and sank into it, resting her head in her hands. “I’m sorry for what my predecessors did to your family,” she sighed. “But for the good of humanity, it was necessary.”

Kivuli bristled at her words and Lily placed an arm across his chest to stop him from doing anything rash. “What’s done is done,” she said. “Kivuli, I know this isn’t the outcome you wanted, but at least you have closure now. Palladino here has done nothing to you.”

“Thank you, great Sentient queen.” 

“Oh, um, that’s another thing.” Lily tilted her head at Kivuli. “Just like he’s not a Tenno, I’m not actually the Lotus. But I do look  _ exactly _ like her, don’t I? This solar system’s just full of mysteries, even when the Void isn’t involved…” She took Kivuli’s hand and led him toward the door. “We’ll let you get back to work now, Speaker. Thank you for your time.”

* * *

 

 

“Ow!” Margulis winced in sudden pain. She had just been forced out of one of her drones, though in each of the three small battles she was involved in nothing seemed out of place. She ran a quick diagnostic on every body that was seeing action, but all results came back normal. But the sharp pain came again. Somewhere, her drones were being destroyed. 

“Tenno, fall back for a moment. I need to focus elsewhere.” The same command went out to all three squads and the Tenno followed through, taking up more defensive positions against the two Corpus and one Grineer assault teams they faced. 

Margulis mentally flinched again as another drone was suddenly rendered nonfunctional. She reviewed her position, taking stock of all the bodies she currently inhabited, categorizing them by the planet or region of space where they were located. The problem wasn’t on Ceres, Europa, or Pluto, as those had already been examined. She laid out the rest before her in virtual representation as tiny windows out from headspace, each showing what the drone in question saw. 

Another one went down and the same pain flashed through her mind, the sense of being squeezed from all sides as her hardware failed, but all at once unlike the partial damage she often suffered in battle. This time the knowledge gained was worth the pain, as a clear hole in her array of windows showed which other drones had been nearby the one destroyed. Margulis focused her attention through the subset of her holdings, and froze with alarm. 

These were the sentries she had placed around the Reservoirs on Lua. Someone was assassinating them one by one, with such skill that she couldn’t even identify the attacker. Margulis needed to find out who was attacking her and why, but clearly not by sending more drones. Whoever was responsible, they didn’t seem like the type to let themselves be defeated or captured by Sentient fighters. 

“Hey, Breazeal,” she called, “someone’s picking off our drones on Lua, and I can’t even tell who it is. I’m not getting a chance to fight back. I’m going to pull them all out for now and send a Tenno to investigate.” She began gathering all her sentries together in one place, and returned some of her attention to the battles she had put on hold. 

“Oh great, just what we need. An intrusion at the Reservoir right when we’re starting a major operation.” Breazeal sighed. “I’ll have the first ropalolyst ready in maybe three hours, but we can’t wait that long. We can’t let anyone touch the Reservoirs until every last Tenno is out of there.”

“Yeah… and they’re going to have to wake each other up, since we’ve lost the biolyst.” Margulis mentally reviewed the current chart of Tenno activity and filtered it for those Tenno already present around Lua but not actively involved in a mission. There were fewer names than she expected, as most Tenno were staying busy patrolling the Orokin halls and fighting off incursions from the Grineer and Corpus. Sylfe was a possibility and she had done a good job investigating Hunhow’s reappearance and saving the moon, but given everything the girl had gone through recently Margulis thought it best to give her a break from special alerts for a while. 

The next name to stand out to her was Chirou, a boy on the younger end of the Tenno age range. He tended to accept more time-limited missions than most and he pushed himself hard, and he was no stranger to fighting alone. With his favored Mesa warframe, he habitually cut down hordes of Grineer before his teammates even had a chance to attack. He would be a good choice to investigate the intrusion. 

She opened a direct link to the particular Tenno’s ship. “Tenno! Something has happened on Lua and my sentries have gone unresponsive. I need you to investigate immediately.”

The other end of the connection blinked open to reveal a Mesa decorated in red and gold. “Oh, hey mom. Still purple, I see. So, ‘s this a track and destroy type thing, or more stealthy like, or what?” Chirou leaned back from the navigation screen to support himself on his hands. “Whatever it is, I can handle it.”

“Good. Deploy a warframe to Lua. I believe we have an intrusion in the Zeipel complex. This will be a solo mission; are you up for the task?”

“This frame’s the fastest gun in the solar system. I’ve got this. Tell me the details once I’m down.” Chirou’s landing craft detached from his orbiter and plummeted down toward the surface of Lua. 

The Tenno dropped to the floor on a large balcony at the edge of an Orokin building, with a clang and a thud. He looked back up at the ship and called, “Ordis, could you  _ please _ just get a grate that won’t fall out of the ship all the time? I’m not sticking it back in for you this time, I’ve got an urgent thing to do here.” He set off toward the coordinates Margulis had marked on his internal mapping systems. 

Along the way, Margulis spoke to him. “It was here that the Orokin put you into the dream, tried to twist you into weapons of war. Here where my dream of taming the Void within you was lost, as they pushed it outward to become stronger. In a way, this is where the modern idea of Tenno was born.”

“But not where I was really born. I remember before… but only bits.”

“When the Zariman was found adrift, the Orokin did everything they could to erase their mistakes. Transit recordings, personnel logs… everything was wiped out. To them, the appearance of perfection was more important than learning from their failures, and your mere existence shattered that facade. They were going to destroy you too, until the Lotus intervened. When your own species cast you out, the Sentients took you in with open arms… well, some Sentients more open than others.”

She stopped as her analysis combined with the warframe’s own sensors registered something out of the ordinary. “I’m detecting an unknown signature further ahead. Find out who it is and what they’re up to.”

Chirou slowed down just a little and unholstered his twin pistols. Margulis tried her best to pinpoint the intruder for him, but the disturbance she sensed was constantly on the move. The Tenno rounded a corner and caught a brief glimpse of a figure disappearing down a side hallway. Not a warframe, not Grineer, a human with an odd headpiece. 

“I just saw the intruder… moving fast. I think it’s Teshin.”

“Teshin? What is he doing here? It looks like he’s heading toward a Reservoir. Follow him.”

Chirou rounded the corner expecting to see Teshin vanishing up ahead of him again, but was met just as he turned with the man’s hand pressed firmly into his stomach. Teshin stared up at the tall warframe’s face and warned, “Leave now. This doesn’t concern you, child.” He gave Chirou a shove and whirled around, sprinting off into the distance again. 

The Tenno ran after him, calling out, “What are you doing here?” but he received no answer. Now that Chirou had encountered Teshin once, Margulis was able to track him more precisely, and she marked a spot on the Tenno’s map where Teshin had come to a stop. 

Chirou followed at top speed and nearly fell down a flight of stairs, instead managing to leap up on the central handrail and slide down, landing next to Teshin as he stood facing a circle of six golden pods. A ripple of Transference energy pulsed around them both and the connection to the Mesa that let Margulis see through the warframe’s sensors like her own was momentarily disrupted. The Tenno put a hand to his head, but the sensation passed as quickly as it had come. 

“What was that?”

Now Teshin finally saw fit to answer Chirou’s questions. “The Queens,” he said simply. 

“Queens? Like the Grineer Queens? Tell me what–”

“I am warning you. You think you’re safe behind this metal, but you’re not. Not in the ways that matter here. Behind this, you’re still just a child.”

Chirou snorted. “I’m well over a hundred, you know that. Not my fault I only age when outside a warframe.” 

“And I remember a time before the Zariman was even conceived of. Listen to your elder this one time:  _ leave. _ Follow me again, Tenno, and you will answer to my sword.” Teshin withdrew a small object from a hidden pocket in his clothing and tossed it on the ground. A brilliant flash of light stunned the Tenno and the Lotus who watched with him, and when it faded two identical Teshins were running toward the exit on the opposite side of the room. 

Chirou sprinted after them, taking an occasional potshot at their legs with his Tigris Prime. Margulis took the opportunity to express her own confusion at the recent events. “I thought the Queens were just an invention of Grineer command. No one has ever seen them in the flesh.”

“I’m getting the sense Teshin has. Can you track him?”

“Not with that Specter masking him. But Tenno, we don’t know anything about the Queens. Maybe we should let Teshin–”

“No. Teshin’s not going to tell me what I can and can’t do. Not outside the Conclave anyway. Which one’s the Specter? I’ll take it out.”

Margulis took the last twenty seconds of the Mesa’s visuals and parsed it through a program to analyze the subtle differences between the two running figures. Teshin was in good physical shape, but even his movement was inefficient compared to a hard-light projection of him with a programmed animation cycle. 

“The one on the right is the Specter,” Margulis said. “Try to slow it down. I can track Teshin by its connection to him, but I’ll need you to have physical contact with it while it’s still active. A second is all I need, but it will make finding him again a lot easier.”

Chirou stopped for just a moment to aim, and released two rounds into the Specter’s back. Splinters of light flew off in all directions like sparks but beneath them the human figure remained intact, though it now glowed a little brighter than Teshin’s reflective armor and ran a tiny bit slower. The Tenno lowered his weapon to run faster so he wouldn’t lose it in these halls. 

He rounded a corner to see only a single Teshin ahead of him. The other, likely the real one, had split from his double and disappeared down a side passage before Chirou could see him go. The Tenno took aim again, and fired another duplex into the Specter’s left thigh. Sparks flew from the hole, this time spraying out for much longer than they had after the first shots. The false Teshin’s movement was barely faster than a walking pace now, and his whole body was leaking light as the Specter’s small built-in battery worked in overdrive to keep it from falling apart. 

The Tenno ran forward and tackled the Specter to the floor. “Lotus, you getting what you need here?”

“I have a lock on his route,” Margulis confirmed. “Finish that off, and exfiltrate when you’re ready.”

It felt strange for Chirou to hold down a struggling copy of his Conclave mentor and press a gun into his chest, but the Tenno reminded himself it was not real, not actually Teshin who was fighting to get away, just a projection of the man who had long since vanished through the corridors of Lua. It felt even stranger to pull the trigger and see the Specter still thrashing about, healing wounds that would be fatal to a human at the cost of additional power consumption. Chirou had to put six more bullets into the Specter before its core finally overloaded and shut down. 

While the Tenno reached an exterior point where Ordis could pick him up, Margulis was busy examining the readings from the Specter. Her data was not complete; for that she would have needed a full scan, but the preliminary readings would be enough. All Specters had to maintain a constant link to the entity they copied in order to hold their shape, though the original could be planets away. In the case of the warframe Specters that Tenno sometimes used, the true images were generally in storage on the user’s orbiter, but not so with this ethereal Teshin. 

The signal pointed in the general direction of Jupiter. Margulis signaled to Chirou that he should make his way there across the solar rails, while she combed over the entire planetary system for non-Corpus transmissions. One moon after another was cleared, until she saw a suspicious narrow beam emanating from Carpo, a tiny rock whose single Corpus base covered over a quarter of the surface. 

“Teshin is trying to mask his location from us, but I have pinpointed a suspicious signal for you to investigate. Find him. We need answers.”

Chirou landed at the nearest open spot to where Margulis had indicated, and he set off toward the waypoint. “Why hasn’t he reached out to us?” the Tenno wondered aloud. “If he’s going after the Queens, he ought to want us helping him.”

“Pride or shame, he does seem to have some connection to them. But knowing nothing about the Queens, I can’t begin to speculate about their relationship. Stay on the trail. With or without Teshin, tracking down the Queens can give us a major tactical advantage against the Grineer.”

“Understood.” Chirou said, and continued on his way. This section of the base was eerily quiet, with not a single Corpus soldier or robot in sight. It was only when he saw a shattered camera above a door and a single moa leg in the middle of the floor that he realized why it was so empty. This must have been the same path Teshin took through the complex, eliminating everything in his way. 

An automatic door slid open before him to reveal a mid-sized room full of broken robot parts, mounded up several feet high. Every Corpus proxy in the building had been sliced apart and the pieces dragged in here and piled over each other, and Chirou and Margulis both were grateful no human bodies seemed to be among the wreckage. Chirou carefully stepped over moa and osprey bits to make his way around the main pile. The waypoint was very close now, but he still saw no sign of Teshin himself, only the destruction left in his wake. 

Suddenly a disk of metal with a glowing edge flew out from behind the mound and snapped into place above Chirou’s head. The Tenno in his warframe was lifted off the ground and a jolt of electricity ran through the Mesa, before the disk flew back the way it had come. Now Teshin was in view, leaning against the wall, and he casually reached up to pluck the Orvius out of the air as it returned to him. 

“Teshin, there you are,” Chirou called. “Why don’t you want us finding the Queens? What did you mean back there?”

The only response was another throw of the Orvius, forcing Chirou to roll to the side to avoid another painful shock. He drew his Regulator pistols and aimed, but held his fire. Teshin caught the returning Orvius again and immediately swapped it for his nikana and charged the Tenno. 

Now the warframe’s systems engaged, targeting the attacker’s arms and legs in an attempt to disable him without killing him. Within a second the Tenno, handing off control of the warframe’s arms to the algorithm, had pumped sixteen bullets into the man, but that did nothing to slow him down. Chirou was struck hard by a brightly glowing nikana held in a brightly glowing hand, and as he stumbled back he called out to the Lotus, “It’s another Specter!” 

“How is that possible? My trace should have found him. Capture that one too.”

Chirou holstered his pistols and grabbed at the Specter’s sword arm. “Just tell me when I can kill it,” he said, trying to wrench the weapon out of the figure’s grip. 

“That’s enough contact already. And just so you know, you can’t disarm a Specter. The weapon and body are part of the same form.” Margulis began decrypting the data she had just picked up on the second Specter. 

While the Lotus worked, Chirou pushed as hard as he could against the solid light of the Specter, throwing the false Teshin back. Both combatants stumbled over robot parts and landed on their backs on the floor, but at the distance they were apart from each other the advantage now lay with Chirou. A single pair of shots from the Tigris was enough to push the Specter’s power consumption over the edge to where it could no longer keep itself solid through the damage it had sustained. 

“Teshin’s scheme was very clever, but I believe I’ve found him now,” Margulis said. “That first Specter you encountered was not actually a clone of Teshin himself, it was a clone of this other Specter. He must have deployed it before you even landed on Lua, and sent it here. The false tracking signal threw us off and bought Teshin some time to get away. However, I doubt the chain goes any deeper. This control signature is pointing to what should be an unpopulated asteroid field, but deep scans are showing the presence of a security matrix. I’ll need you to investigate.”

“Got it. Send Ordis the spot and we’ll head over there.” 

Margulis switched on a Void beacon attached to the single oculyst she had in the area, and transmitted its characteristic frequency to the ship Cephalon. A minute later, Chirou’s orbiter emerged from the Void just outside the asteroid field, far out on the edge of the solar system. “Tenno, prepare your archwing. There’s a lot more here than there should be, and I want to find out what they’re hiding. Ordis, do you see any good openings?”

“There is a shipping corridor over here,” the Cephalon replied. “Outside it lie burst scanners, proximity mines, and powerful laser weapons. Inside there are only linear scanners. I recommend following that shipment in and using it as cover.”

“Alright. Chirou, catch up to it quickly, before it passes the first scanner. Keep the transport between yourself and the beams.”

The Tenno ejected from his landing craft into space, and Ordis sent out his Odonata archwing to catch up to the warframe and attach. A single quick burst of the afterburners sent him forward to the small cargo container being brought in, and he stayed close to the top edge as it passed over a linear scanner from below. His archwing was significantly faster than this Grineer shuttle, however, so once the first scanner was past he hung back to position himself, waiting to make a single burst past the next scanner while the transport blocked its view. 

Margulis and Ordis watched and waited in nervous anticipation as Chirou made it past a third scanner undetected. Just one more, scanning the left side of the cargo, and he would be through. The Tenno glided gently over to the right edge of the tunnel and drifted forward to stay alongside the ship. He was going just a tiny bit too fast and had to reverse to stop himself drifting ahead of the ship into the path of the beam, but he managed to reverse just in time. 

A collective sigh of relief was felt by all. “You’re through,” Margulis said. 

“And might I say that was smooth, Operator,” Ordis added. There was no response from the Tenno himself. 

Margulis scanned around using the warframe’s internal sensors in tandem with with her own processing power. “This checkpoint appears to be the central hub of the security matrix,” she announced. “There’s a console over there. Shut it all down, but don’t be detected.”

“They can’t raise an alarm if there’s no one left,” Chirou commented as he unholstered his twin pistols once again. He flicked a switch on a small box attached to his side, connecting an auxiliary battery pack directly into his warframe’s systems so he wouldn’t have to worry about running out of power while any Grineer here still lived. It would take an hour to recharge back aboard his orbiter, but this was as good a use as any for the emergency supply. 

Chirou moved slowly forward and looked in all directions, cutting down every Grineer in sight in an instant, before most could even look at him and raise their weapons. The two short side hallways with their single control room each were cleared in moments, and the Tenno lowered his guns to do a final quick lap around the checkpoint, returning once he was satisfied to the central terminal. 

“Ordis, could you hack this one? If this is the Queens, it might be a stronger code here that we haven’t seen outside.” Chirou extended a cord from his Mesa’s wrist and plugged it into the terminal. “No pressure.”

Five seconds later, the terminal lights switched to green, and the Cephalon’s voice came across to Chirou and Margulis. “Who’s in control now, suckers? I mean, er… the security matrix is offline. That wasn’t actually any harder than the usual Grineer encryption.”

“Good to know. Let’s see what all this is hiding.” Chirou jogged out the main hallway forward, past the now deactivated laser barrier. He emerged into an open courtyard looking out over the asteroid field and stared in disbelief at the marvel of engineering before him. “Lotus, are you seeing this?” he asked. 

The Tenno’s words crackled with interference and the warframe sensors were full of static overlaying their images, but Margulis could see it too. “It must be the Queens’ fortress.”

“Are those Fomorian engines mounted on an asteroid? No wonder we’ve never been able to find this place. It’s always moving.” More static accompanied the boy’s words. 

“Excellent work, Chirou. Now get out of there. We need to analyze the intel you’ve gathered and plan our next move.”

The Tenno shook his head. “Negative. I’m heading in for a closer look. This is our chance. If the base moves we’ll lose this opportunity.”

“There’s a lot of interference in this area. I can barely hear you. If you go any closer, I won’t be able to see anything you discover in there. I recommend we follow the fortress from a distance and wait for Teshin to reach out.”

Chirou was already powering up his archwing again. “You can review the logs when I come out. I haven’t come this far just to back out now. See you on the other side, mom.” The Odonata engines lit up and Chirou sped away toward the fortress. Every meter he moved brought him deeper into the interference field, and Margulis’s vision through the Tenno’s warframe grew more and more obscured by static until finally she could see nothing but gray. 


	5. The Blight Within, part 2

“Tenno, you’ve returned! Are you okay?” The Lotus’s worried voice sounded through the Tenno ship. 

A moment later the transmission was returned with an answer. “I’m fine,” Chirou said. He sat in front of his navigation window as himself now, in human form rather than wearing the Mesa. “In fact, I feel better than I did before.”

“I’m glad to hear it. What happened in there? There was so much distortion around the Queens’ fortress, I couldn’t see a thing.” 

Chirou smiled slightly. “Teshin saved my life,” he said. “You can trust him. He just wanted to keep the Tenno out of danger.”

The purple hologram nodded. “Good.” Behind the Tenno, a long red and black rod caught Margulis’s eye. “Is that a kuva scepter?” she asked, incredulous. 

“Oh, this?” Chirou reached back and grasped the scepter to show it to the camera. “It belonged to one of the Grineer Queens. One who, uh… won’t be using her throne anymore, if you know what I mean.”

“You killed one of them? Impressive work, Tenno. I understand now why Teshin said you wouldn’t be safe even behind a warframe. Kuva has properties that let it strike at a mind directly. I know it well – I’ve been on the receiving end of a Continuity attempt myself, though I managed to reject it. How many Queens were there? We need to know everything we can about them.”

“I only saw one other,” Chirou said, “but there could be more. Anyway, Lotus, do you have any missions for me? I’d like a chance to try out these new powers that Teshin helped me get.”

“New powers?” Margulis tried to think of what the Tenno could be referring to. “But you weren’t with the Orokin during the Old War, were you? They made their Tenno forget some of their abilities in the dream, but you…” The hologram looked down and shook its head slightly to convey Margulis’s confusion. “Never mind, I must be misremembering. Personally, I’d say you should rest and not take missions for a while, but I believe your squad is looking for you. Shall I patch you through to them?”

“Yes, please do.” Chirou smiled and sat up straighter, and the image of the Lotus on screen vanished. Three smaller windows took her place, showing a Nova Prime, a Loki, and a Chroma. 

“There you are!” a girl’s voice called. The screen indicated it was the Nova who was speaking. “What took you so long?”

Chirou shrugged. “Just got tied up in a mission, that’s all. You know how it is. And the Lotus just told me that you want me for another mission.”

“Yeah, the Fomorian capture, remember? We’re the lucky squad who get to use the clan’s Railjack. Grab a warframe and come on over.”

“I’ll be right there.” Chirou stood up and shut off the communications. “Ordis, take me to the Railjack.” He turned and walked back through the ship to his Transference pod. It slid open at his approach and he climbed in, closing his eyes as it shut around him. A moment later he awoke as the Mesa and stepped out of the arsenal to make his way back up to the front. 

“Operator, are you sure you don’t wish to rest a while, as the Lotus suggested?” The ship Cephalon voiced his concern even as he flew the Tenno to meet up with his squad.

“Not now. If they’re trying to capture a Balor Fomorian, I need to be there with them.” Chirou paced back and forth in front of navigation, then wandered back to the arsenal again to look over the extensive collection of weapons. It was several minutes more before Ordis announced that they had arrived at their destination. 

The landing craft detached from the orbiter and made the short trip over to latch onto the side of the Railjack. Once Chirou was aboard it returned without him, and Ordis departed to carry the Tenno’s somatic link to a safe distance. 

The Chroma of the squad met him at the door. The large warframe clapped Chirou on the back and the boy piloting it exclaimed, “Welcome back, Chirou! Good to have the whole squad back together again!” He led the way into the ship. 

“Glad I could make it,” Chirou replied as he followed the other Tenno. “I wouldn’t want to miss something like this.” The pair arrived in the central open area of the Railjack and each took a seat, with the Nova Prime and Loki already present. “So, what’s the plan here?” Chirou asked. 

The Nova shrugged. “Aren’t you usually the strategy guy?”

“Oh, um…” Chirou glanced around the room nervously. “I’m… not really prepared for this one. You know, with everything that’s been going on recently.” His words grew more confident as he spoke. “I’m still just a little tired and dizzy after my last mission, that’s why. There wasn’t much chance to think about capturing a Fomorian while I was dealing with Grineer command. Just fill me in on what you’ve got and we’ll work from there.”

“Alright, well, first order of business is figuring out who’s on which spot in the Railjack,” the girl in the Nova said. “Cephalon Cy’s taking us to the Fomorian now, but once we’re up close we’ll need a Tenno piloting. One or two on weapons, and probably one of us outside with an archwing.”

“I’ll take the helm,” the Loki volunteered. 

“Okay, Lyssa in the pilot’s seat. Chirou, you’re probably the best one here at archwing, but I can do that instead if you want. But either way… Jumol, do you want turrets or the laser cannon?”

The Chroma gestured noncommittally with one arm. “Turrets, I guess? I’ll leave the big guns to… which one of you is doing that? Chirou, are you okay to do some archwing combat?”

The Tenno nodded. “I’m sure I can handle it.”

“So Trieven gets the laser cannon. Sounds good.” Jumol looked up at the ceiling. “Cephalon Cy, how long until we reach the Fomorian?”

“You will reach your destination in eleven minutes,” the Cephalon stated. 

“We’ve got a little time then.” Jumol returned his gaze to Chirou. “So, tell us what you’ve been up to! What kind of mission was that where even mom couldn’t reach you?” 

“Oh, I was just having a little chat with one of the Grineer Queens.” Chirou said nonchalantly. 

“What? They’re real?”

“They’re real and you found them?”

Chirou waved a hand as if to indicate it was no big deal. “Teshin led me to their fortress. There’s so much interference around the place that the Lotus can’t get through. I went in, as stealthy as I could, and found the Queens’ throne room. Just the four of us in there: two Queens, one Tenno, and Teshin.” The others listened with rapt attention to Chirou’s tale. “Teshin saved my life in there. And now, there’s only  _ one _ Queen in Kuva Fortress. I made sure of that.”

Chirou slung the long black and red staff off his back with a satisfied smile and showed it to his squad. “This is the weapon one of them used. She won’t be needing it anymore. The Lotus called it a kuva scepter.” He ran his hands down the full length, from the base up to the crook at the top where a vial full of red liquid was firmly attached. “I may not have a chance here, but at some point I’ll have to try it out. It was certainly an impressive weapon in the Queen’s hands.” 

“What were they like?” Lyssa asked. “The Queens, I mean. I’ve heard Grineer radio chatter mention them but there’s never any useful information there.”

“Terrifying,” Chirou said. “Beautiful, powerful… royalty and they knew it. Not at all like the dirty, malformed Grineer you see on the battlefields. Unbelievable fighters, both of them. Without Teshin I wouldn’t have had a chance.”

“Well, I’m glad you made it out alive then,” the Loki remarked. “Not sure I’d want to meet them up close myself.” 

“Believe me, you wouldn’t.” Chirou stood up from his seat. “I guess we should all get ready now, right?” He walked to the side of the central meeting area as the others rose as well, and turned down the hallway toward the front of the ship. 

Trieven called out behind him. “Archwings are the other way!”

“Right, of course.” Chirou spun around and shook his head as if to clear it, then walked sheepishly back to make his way aft of center. “It’s too easy to get turned around in here.”

The arsenal of the Railjack held four archwings along one wall, ready at chest height for a warframe to step into them. Racks of extra weapons stood opposite them, as well as empty spaces to hold more. There was even a single unmanned Excalibur warframe standing in a corner, though if a spare somatic link was also present on the ship, it was not stored here. Chirou backed into an Itzal and the robotic wings clamped onto his shoulders, adjusting themselves automatically to fit the warframe he wore. 

In the artificial gravity of the Railjack, the archwing weighed heavily down on him and the Tenno found it a little difficult to walk. He didn’t dare engage the flight systems while inside the ship, certain he would end up smashing himself into a wall at high speed if he tried it. Slowly he made his way to the very back of the Railjack to the loading bay to await the ship’s arrival at the Fomorian battlefield. 

He had barely stood there a minute before the ship Cephalon’s voice came through every speaker. “You have reached your destination, Operators. Transferring flight control to manual. Weapon systems are online.”

Next over the intercom came Lyssa, the Tenno pilot. “Confirmed. I have manual flight systems. Shall I take us in?” Her words could be heard clearly through the warframes themselves as well as the onboard speakers, giving a slight echo to the sound. 

“I’m at the left turret,” Jumol said. “Ready when you are.”

“Also ready at the topside guns,” Trieven reported. 

Chirou sent his confirmation out as well. “Archwing ready. Open the hatch whenever it’s time for me to get out there.”

“Won’t be long,” Lyssa told him. “Looks like we’ve got several other Tenno ships ready to follow us in. Mostly just landing craft, but each one of them is going to have at least one more archwing helping us out. First one to go in gets a massive target on their back, so I guess everyone’s been waiting for a big ship like us to show up.” The Tenno laughed maniacally. “Let’s do this!”

There was a noticeable jolt of acceleration through the ship as the pilot turned the engine power to maximum, and Chirou grabbed onto a stack of heavy crates to keep his balance. Every shift and bump was amplified through his top-heavy frame, and he couldn’t wait to get out into space where his stability was not dependent on the whims of a teenage adrenaline junkie. 

“Can I get a yeehaw, anyone?” Lyssa called out to the squad. She was met with silence across the radio link. “Aw, you guys are no fun. Oh well. Open fire!”

The Railjack plunged forward into the waiting crowd of Grineer ships surrounding the Fomorian. Bullets and energy pellets were traded both ways as the loading bay door slid open at the rear of the ship. Chirou looked out to see a half dozen Tenno deploying one by one from the bottoms of their landing craft. He stepped forward to the edge of the loading bay, took a deep breath, then leapt out into empty space. 

He found himself quickly floating upward over the top of the Railjack, as the gravity inside the ship was no longer there to counteract the force of his jump. He fumbled around for a moment to engage the archwing’s flight systems, letting muscle memory do most of the work as he familiarized himself with the wings. The engines flickered on just in time to propel Chirou out of the way of the first lancer dreg that was coming at him. 

Chirou spun around and placed a single Tigris round directly in the center of the small Grineer drone, then sped forward to catch up to the Railjack as it dove deeper into the swarm. The archwing responded to his will just as the warframe did; the only difference was getting used to the sensation of moving in three dimensions. He picked off every dreg he saw as he passed by, most before they were even within the range at which they could target him. 

A net of energy shimmered into view ahead of him, glowing faintly red and patterned with hexagons. Chirou slammed on the brakes, but his momentum was so great that he still impacted the hard-light wall with force enough to stun him for a few seconds. 

“Zeplen’s got me,” he called to the squad. “What’s this doing all the way out here? They’re supposed to be up near the Fomorian!” He turned around and scanned over the space within the net to lock onto the large hemispherical machine in the center. 

“Get directly above it,” came the reply from Trieven aboard the Railjack. “You won’t do much damage to it from that side, but it can’t hit you either. The missiles come from the flat part underneath. Just hold on a minute.”

The Railjack swung around sharply to the right without any further command as Lyssa knew what her squadmate wanted to do. The dregs and dargyns that previously Jumol’s turret had been facing were blasted with hot plasma exhaust from the ship’s engines, eliminating them all even as the Chroma had to step back from his station for a moment. The turrets on each side counter-rotated against the ship’s overall movement, but only within a limited range so this sudden reversal still threw off his targeting. 

Lyssa slowed the ship down as it approached the zeplen, aiming to pass it by with the energy net on the Railjack’s right. The laser cannon on top swiveled and its operator called out, “Brace yourself, Chirou! Feet on the zeplen’s cap, and don’t lock your knees!”

Trieven fired the laser cannon directly at the energy net, keeping its beam trained on the glowing sphere even as her ship passed by. The net glowed brighter as it redirected incoming energy around its full surface area. After a few seconds of sustained fire, the feedback between the net and its generator overloaded some circuit deep within the zeplen, and the entire platform ruptured in a massive fireball as the sphere of light around it winked out. The hemispherical cap on top, intended as a shield for the machinery below, served its purpose and remained intact even as it was thrown violently away from the explosion. The Tenno standing atop it was sent with the thick plug of metal as it flew. 

The Loki at the Railjack’s helm caught sight of Chirou as he sailed away from the wreckage and sent her own transmission. “Is that my Itzal? I thought you used an Odonata. You didn’t need us for that, you could have just blinked through the shield!”

“Better to destroy it than leave it up, right?” Chirou called back. “Is there anything out here I should be focusing on?”

“Not really,” Trieven told him. “You and the other Tenno out there can just clear out the little guys. That’s basically what Jumol’s doing too. I’ll handle the big stuff for you.”

“There’s one thing you can do,” Lyssa chimed in. “You’ve got a better view out there. If the Balor starts looking at me, you let me know, okay? Its laser is a little bigger than ours.”

“Got it.” Chirou set off toward a cluster of Grineer in a variety of different types of dargyns. He cut the archwing’s engines off and coasted toward them, holding his arms and wings out wide to make sure they all noticed he was there. In unison the Grineer raised their weapons, machine guns and missile launchers alike, and those which had energy shields on the front activated them at his approach. 

The first few dargyns began to fire, and instantly Chirou blinked out of existence and reappeared half a kilometer from where he had been before, on the other side of the group. He spun around and drew the Regulator pistols from his belt, preparing to do what a Mesa always did when faced with a hostile crowd. A push of willpower in the right direction transferred control of the warframe’s arms to its automated targeting systems, and moments later the first bullets reached their marks. Most of the Grineer received two rounds each in the back, as the first shot had not yet reached them by the time Chirou’s warframe fired another.

“Nice one, Chirou!” The Railjack zoomed past and the Tenno got a glimpse of Jumol waving at him from the side turret. 

Chirou laughed and thanked him. “I haven’t had this much fun in ages,” he called. “Who’s next?” He spun his archwing around to seek out a new target, as a large construction ship lumbered out from behind the Fomorian. “An ogma, huh? Alright, you can be next!” 

Chirou sped toward the beast even as Trieven called for him to stop. “No, that’s too big, let me handle it! Lyssa, take us in!”

“Don’t worry, I know how to take these down,” Chirou said grimly. He blinked past a missile fired from the ogma’s left arm and kept going, aiming directly for its face with none of his weapons drawn. As he got closer the ogma’s pilot activated the ship’s mining drill on its other arm, but its size and lack of maneuverability let Chirou slip past easily into close range where the ogma could not hit him.

He clamped onto the front of the mining ship and made his way carefully over to one side where the leading armor plate joined to the rest. “Get the big guns ready,” he told the squad as he pulled with all his might at the seams. 

The warframe’s strength alone was not enough to burst the bolts holding the plate onto the ogma’s front. Chirou jumped out of the way as the cannon arm took a swipe at him, then returned to run his fingers over the edge, seeking out the weakest points. A duplex round from his Tigris Prime sliced neatly through the first bolt, and he moved on to the next. 

Cutting five of the eight rivets was enough to let Chirou get his hands under the plate and lever it upward. He strained with all his mechanical strength, wedging himself into the growing gap and bracing with his feet on the ship and one shoulder under the armor as he slowly stood and pushed the thick armor away. 

Aboard the Railjack, there was increasing concern from the other members of the Tenno squad. While Chirou worked to expose the ogma’s weak point, dozens of smaller ships were converging on his position, and he seemed unaware of the growing danger. Neither of the weapons stations dared fire while their companion was in the midst of the crowd. 

“Lyssa, can you fly through and disrupt that swarm?” Jumol asked. 

“I don’t think so. Got to keep my distance if I want to dodge these missiles.” The pilot groaned in aggravation. “Why isn’t he doing that under penumbra? He should have known that stunt would attract attention, and it’s too late to vanish now.”

“I think I need to go help him,” Trieven said. “Jumol, can you take over the heavy cannon? One good shot to that thing’s face should do it, but not with Tenno in the way.” Without waiting for an answer, the Nova got up from her post and ran down the stairs to pick up an Amesha from the armory. 

The moment she was gone from the Railjack, Jumol too stepped out of his seat. He turned to face an empty space behind the turret and transferred out of the Chroma warframe. “Now’s our chance,” he said aloud. The Chroma knelt down and drew her operator into a tight embrace. 

“Go,” Serreta said softly. “Protect our friends. I’ve got this station under control.” She gave her partner one last squeeze, then stood and returned to the turret. 

Jumol jogged through the ship in his human form and ascended to take over the laser cannon at the Railjack’s peak. He took a moment to familiarize himself with the controls and aimed toward the ogma, but kept his hand off the trigger. 

In the distance, Trieven cast her watchful swarm around Chirou and his Itzal, protecting him from the hail of energy pellets coming from the dregs surrounding them both. Vengeful rush came next, summoning an energy field to protect herself while she projected three decoys around the ogma. She slipped past the ship’s drill arm just as easily as her squad mate had and helped with the final push and twist to remove the ogma’s frontal covering. 

“Ready for the laser,” Trieven reported. She glided over to wrap her arms around Chirou’s waist. “Blink us out of here so Jumol can take the shot.”

In an instant the pair were outside the swarm, and the Nova let go and turned back to face the ogma and its entourage of dregs and dargyns. With the Fomorian behind them, some were barely visible in front of the vast expanse of gray metal while others were silhouetted against the red lights… one of which was getting noticeably brighter the longer she looked. 

“Lyssa,  _ move! Now! _ ” Trieven yelled for her squadmate and the Loki’s operator reacted on reflex, accelerating the Railjack out of its almost stationary position. A wide beam of red lanced out of the Balor’s eye into space just as a blue-white laser shot from the Railjack, but due to the sudden jolt both Tenno and Grineer missed their targets. 

“That was a close one,” Lyssa said with a chuckle. “I hope there wasn’t anything important behind me.” She brought the Railjack around to give Jumol another clear shot at the ogma. 

“It will take them a few minutes to recharge the main beam,” Chirou said. “Now is the best chance to get up close if you need to.”

Another shot came from the Railjack’s laser cannon, this time striking the ogma directly in the front where thick armor no longer protected it. The beam ripped through the internal machinery with ease, slicing the ship in half and finally ending the threat of its powerful missiles. 

Trieven dove back toward the crowd. As she coasted through the midst of the confused dregs, warding herself from flying shrapnel, she sent a burst of energy through her warframe’s systems. A spherical ripple of plasma spread outward through space, coating each Grineer drone and slowing their movement. “This group’s primed,” she sent to the squad. “Take them out before they separate.”

The Railjack’s left side turret switched on for another burst and pumped slugs of metal into the swarm. Each drone that was hit exploded with significantly more force than mere mechanical failure would produce, leading to a chain reaction that slowly bubbled through the entire crowd. Trieven drifted out the other side just in time to turn around and watch her handiwork from a safe distance. 

Just then, a new voice was transmitted to the ears of all Tenno in the area. “Need any help over there, Tenno?” the Lotus asked. “I’ve built a new heavy fighter drone and I’m bringing it to the Fomorian now.”

“We’ve got it pretty well covered I think,” Lyssa replied, “but we’ll take any reinforcements we can get.” To her team she sent, “I don’t know what mom’s got but I’m excited to see it. Trieven, come on back, let’s see what we can do before she gets here.”

Aboard the Railjack, Jumol sent a surge of Void energy through his Transference link, calling Serreta back to him at the laser cannon. He transferred out again and said to his partner, “Sorry, got to keep up appearances. Come find me once Trieven relieves you.” He gave the Chroma a quick kiss on the cheek and ran down the stairs, hurrying to get back to the turret before he crossed paths with the returning Nova. 

Trieven landed back in the cargo bay not a minute later, and hung her Amesha archwing back on its rack. She made her way up to the top of the ship and greeted the Chroma waiting there, who gave her only a silent thumbs-up before jogging down the staircase to rejoin Jumol. 

“I’m tired of hiding like this,” Serreta said. “Can’t we at least tell our squad that I’m alive?”

Jumol stood up and wrapped his arms around the warframe, though his head only came up to the warframe’s chest. “I know,” he murmured. “But I don’t know how to tell them now.” 

“We’ve fought together for so long now… Don’t they deserve to know the truth?”

“Yes, but…” Jumol sighed. “They attended your funeral. They watched me act all heartbroken for  _ months _ . I told them to their faces that I was learning to use your old favorite warframe as a way of remembering you. How do we come out and say we’ve been lying to them for a hundred years?”

Lyssa’s voice came across the intercom. “Everything alright back there? I’m not seeing much turret fire.”

Jumol’s eyes went wide and he surged his Transference to reenter the warframe, so his response could go through with his own voice rather than Serreta’s. “Yeah, sorry, just thinking. I’m on it.” He sat the shared body down behind the guns again and projected thoughts internally to his girlfriend. “We’ll figure something out. When this battle is done and we’re all safe, we’ll tell them the truth.”

In the distance, a flash of yellow and orange light flared up for an instant, then faded again to nothing. Where it had been now floated a machine the size of a Tenno landing craft with two thick wing-arms, and a sharp central body with a beak over a pair of wicked claws. Its exterior was burnished a pinkish lavender in some places, the rest a plain gray. 

“Tenno, this is a ropalolyst.” The familiar hologram appeared once again on the side of every warframe’s vision, though it seemed more detailed and humanlike than the transmissions of previous days. “It will help you fight the Grineer ships surrounding the Fomorian. Try to find a way inside the beast. We need it captured in one piece.”

The Sentient heavy fighter swooped forward to grab a hellion dargyn in its talons. It squeezed and twisted its claws in opposite directions, then tossed scraps of metal and a mutilated Grineer body out into space. A pair of dregs floated toward the drone, their automated target-seeking systems guiding them without any Grineer operator’s fear to hold them back. The ropalolyst raised its claws toward them and a thin line of hot pink light shot from each to obliterate the tiny Grineer machines. 

For the first time since the battle began, Chirou found himself without a ready supply of foes. More Tenno with archwings had been trickling in over the course of the battle, and now with the arrival of the Lotus personally, fewer and fewer Grineer were choosing him as their target. He floated in empty space for a moment, pondering how to proceed. 

“Hey, Railjack crew! Want to take out some zeplens?”

“Sure, why not?” Lyssa replied. “Do you see some around?”

“They should be scattered all around the Fomorian, preventing access by anything without a valid Grineer control signature,” Chirou said. “Haven’t you noticed when blowing these things up before?”

“I’ve noticed some, yeah, but never a whole globe of them. But maybe I’ve just been late to the party? Come on, Chirou, you can help point them out to us. Maybe trigger them one at a time so Trieven can destroy them like the one earlier.”

Chirou zoomed directly toward the Fomorian, even blinking forward a few times to cover the distance quicker. There were indeed zeplens in front of the giant ship, but primarily clustered around the shield generators on either side near the top of the ship, certainly not enough to overlap their spheres into an impenetrable barrier. Maybe Vay Hek was skimping on materials or embezzling funds, or maybe he was simply bad at his job, but whatever the case the Tenno could access much of the Fomorian unrestricted. 

“There’s one here,” Chirou called, flaring his afterburners to create a signal for the Railjack. He glided back and forth in a line pointing at the zeplen, careful to stay out of range of its energy field himself. 

“I see it,” Trieven said. She turned the laser cannon to aim carefully, and placed a beam directly on the unshielded lower half of the generator. 

Chirou flew across to the other side of the Fomorian, looking for a zeplen in the corresponding position to the one his squadmate had just destroyed. Against the black of space their gray, unlit forms were difficult to see until it was too late, and the Tenno found himself once again within the confines of a shimmering red net. 

Lyssa spun the Railjack around so sharply that all three warframes were nearly thrown out of their seats. She raced over toward the glowing sphere, ready to protect Chirou from the barrage of missiles that would be coming for him, but before Trieven could fire at it a pink laser struck the net from the other side. The Tenno flinched and held her fire, no longer sure she wouldn’t hit her companion through the collapsing grid. 

The ropalolyst swooped through the wreckage to pause in front of the Railjack for a brief moment then continued on its way, flying upward across the face of the Fomorian. Trieven gazed up to follow its path from her vantage point at the top of the Tenno ship. Another ogma was up there, recently released from some internal docking bay where it would normally be kept in case emergency repairs were needed, now given the new purpose of using its missiles to destroy anything in its way. 

As the Tenno continued onward to take out another zeplen farther around the Fomorian’s great bulk, their Sentient mother grasped the ogma’s missile and drill arms in her claws. She flew back away from the Fomorian as she thrust the ropalolyst’s hooked beak down onto the edge of the armor plate over the ogma’s delicate interior. She wrenched it away with a single strong pull, then released her grip and floated backward a ways, bringing the two large wings together until they almost touched in front of the drone’s central body. 

A point of energy grew between the wingtips, rapidly flaring from a dull dark red to intense hot pink. Barely a second after it began, the mote exploded into a wide laser that blasted through the ogma’s center with such power that almost nothing was left but the arms. 

The ropalolyst floated serenely in place, its back to the Balor, firing off thin beams at the dargyns which threatened the many Tenno farther away in their archwings. Off to the side, the Railjack and its lone archwing companion turned to bring themselves back around to the main field of battle in front of the Fomorian, and the Tenno pilot noticed that once again the searing eye was opening. 

“Mom, watch out!” Lyssa cried, too late. The giant’s blight was loosed again, the wide red beam immolating the whole of the Sentient heavy fighter. 

The laser shut off and revealed the ropalolyst still floating there, shedding sparks from all over its surface but still intact. “ _ Wow _ , that really stings!” the Lotus said. “Thank goodness for Sentient adaptation. I’ll need some serious repairs later but this drone isn’t done for yet. Tenno, if some of you can board the Fomorian and disrupt its operations, I can help the rest maintain control out here. But hurry; the enemy is surely rallying stronger reinforcements.”

“Well, I guess we should stop killing Grineer out here and find a way inside,” Chirou said to his squad. “Is there an Atomos in the Railjack arsenal?”

“Pretty sure we’ve got one, yeah. I’ll bring it out to you.” Jumol got up from the turret and made his way to the arsenal to search through the clan’s weapon racks for the small Grineer mining tool. He grabbed the Ignis next to it as well, and stepped backward into his Odonata until it clicked and attached to his warframe. As he entered the loading bay he called out to the other Tenno aboard, “Come on, you two! Get an archwing and let’s do this!”

Jumol leapt out into space and was soon followed by Trieven, but the final Tenno hesitated. Lyssa stayed at the helm to issue a few last commands before she would be ready. “Cephalon Cy, I am returning navigation control to you. Prioritize the ship’s safety, but if any Tenno requests access to our arsenal then I grant them permission to come aboard and take what they need.”

“Confirmed. Clan members will have full access to this Railjack’s functions, and others may borrow weapons but will not be given control of navigation or weapons. I await your return.”

With that, Lyssa followed the others, taking the last available archwing and speeding out into space to meet up with her squad. She pointed toward the top of the Fomorian and said, “Smaller ships have been coming from up there. Maybe there’s a hangar we can break into, and we’ll get inside the Fomorian from there.”

Together the four Tenno flew up out of the view of the Balor’s eye, past a shield generator behind its destroyed zeplen, all the way up to where four giant pillars stuck out diagonally in a cross. Smaller spikes protruded asymmetrically and at odd angles all over the top and back of the Fomorian. The squad drifted peacefully around while the space battle still raged in front of the ship, until Chirou pointed down and turned his archwing to fly directly toward the Fomorian’s hull. 

“There! See the white outline around the base of the comms antenna. A little down and to the left, I think that’s a hatch.”

The others followed behind, not quite able to keep up with the Itzal. They arrived to find Chirou hovering in front of a huge set of hinges, though the plate of metal they were attached to was securely welded down on its other edges. He held out his hand, and Jumol gave him the Atomos. 

Chirou turned the mining tool over to examine it. “Well this is very… round. Which end does the plasma come out again?” He carefully looked into the cavity on one side. “Oh, wait, is that the trigger in there? I get it now, it’s like a glove.” He stuck the Mesa’s hand into the device and turned it around until it felt right. 

A bright beam of glowing plasma shot out from a nozzle on the other side of the Atomos’s bulb. Chirou aimed it at the joint between the Fomorian’s plates and carefully traced over the line, slicing through all the bolts and fasteners that kept this door shut. In moments the former construction and maintenance tunnel was reopened. 

The tunnel was barely five feet wide, enough to admit a warframe if it crouched and pulled its archwing in tight, but nowhere near enough room for any sort of fighting. Given the pipes and loose wires lining both side walls and the ceiling, discharging a weapon in here looked like an unwise decision anyway. 

“Let me go first,” Lyssa said. “If I run into trouble, I’ll switch teleport and whoever’s behind me can break the trouble’s neck.”

“I guess that means me,” Jumol remarked. “This frame’s a strong one, and I can also swap out my fire for toxin if that would help.” 

Chirou volunteered to go next, leaving Trieven with her Nova to take up the rear. One by one they deactivated their archwings and clambered into the tunnel, the shift back into artificial gravity making everyone slightly nauseous. But before they had moved more than a few body-lengths inside, Trieven called for everyone to stop. 

“Before we go in here… does anyone have a flare? Anything to mark our location on the ship, so other Tenno can follow us?”

“Uhh…” The Tenno all searched their gear pockets, and came up empty-handed. “Sorry, I got nothing.”

“It’s okay.” Trieven swapped to a different communication network. “Excuse me, Lotus? This is the boarding party. Can you track my position right now?”

“Of course.” The lavender figure appeared on the side of the Tenno’s vision to deliver her mother’s words. “I see you’re at the top of the Fomorian. Have you found a way inside? The fight outside is escalating quickly as the Grineer bring in reinforcements.”

“We’re in. I just need you to remember this spot and guide people to it.”

“Good work, Tenno. I will mark a waypoint for others to follow.” The hologram flickered out, and Trieven focused her attention back on the tunnel and the Tenno ahead of her. 

Progress was quick once the four got settled in the tight space and arranged their bodies and wings to accommodate it. The path sloped gently downward relative to the direction of gravity, though which way they traveled from an outside perspective nobody could guess. The only thing they had to go on was the occasional sounds of machinery or shouting Grineer which got slightly louder each time they were heard. 

After a while the floor evened out, and the sudden sharp bends they had passed through no longer came. This section of tunnel was straight and regular… on both paths out of the T junction they faced. Lyssa stopped and called back to the others, using the warframes’ radio link rather than speaking aloud. “Anyone got a preference?” she asked. “Left or right?”

“Left?” Chirou suggested. “If we’ve been going straight inward then left is toward the front of the Fomorian.”

“But have we been going straight inward?” Trieven did not sound confident. “All those twists… I have no idea which way we’re facing anymore.”

“Well, if we’ve got nothing else to go on, might as well try left.” Lyssa led the way onward. After a while she dropped forward onto her hands to scurry forward on all fours. Those following behind could see that it was a little faster and potentially more comfortable, but none could bring themselves to join in. 

She stopped suddenly and Jumol nearly ran into the Loki’s rear end. “There’s a grate in the floor here,” she said. “I think we’ve finally got an entrance to the main areas. Pass me the Atomos, but stay back.” Chirou handed the device up to Jumol, who passed it on to Lyssa. She sent a jolt of energy into the Loki’s systems and the entire warframe, archwing included, vanished from view. 

Quick bursts of plasma came from nowhere and severed the joints around the grate. It fell to the floor of the hallway below with a loud crash, and the Tenno exchanged worried comments from within the maintenance tunnel. A heavier thud followed the clanging, signifying that Lyssa had jumped down as well. 

When the invisibility wore off, Jumol peered over the edge to see Lyssa laying on her back on the floor below, motioning for them all to follow. “Are you okay down there?” he asked. 

“Just fine! Come on, there’s no Grineer here yet.”

Jumol stepped forward and leaned to grab the far edge of the hole, then gently levered himself down until he was hanging from the ceiling. He swung his legs back and forth to gain momentum, then released to drop himself next to the fallen grate rather than on top of it. He slid it off to the side so that Chirou and Trieven could drop down with minimal noise as well. 

“Just like most of my missions begin… dropping a grate as I enter.” Trieven laughed briefly. “I’ve told Ordis to fix it, but he insists there’s nothing wrong.”

“Yours falls out too? I thought it was only mine,” Lyssa said. 

“Mine too,” Jumol confirmed. “I’m starting to think there’s a serious design flaw in all our landing craft.” He stood over the prone Loki and asked, “What are you doing on the floor?”

“I tried to roll when I dropped down, but apparently that doesn’t work when you have an archwing on your back. I think I’m stuck.” 

Jumol laughed and offered her a hand to help her up. He looked both ways down the hall and wondered aloud, “Any idea which way is the control room?”

“Just pick a direction and we can follow the signposts as we see them,” Chirou said. “How about this way?” He set off down the hall, hands cautiously resting on his pistols. 

The rest of the squad followed. Trieven once again took up the rear, glancing often behind them to make sure no Grineer were following. It was strangely quiet in the Fomorian’s halls, with not a single Grineer in sight even as they reached a four-way junction and looked down every path. 

Chirou immediately took an interest in the blocky, rectangular writing stenciled onto one corner. “Obey all signs,” he translated. “What a useful message. If someone’s not obeying signs, I don’t think another sign is going to help.”

“You can read that?” Trieven looked at her squadmate in admiration. 

“You can’t? Every soldier should learn the language of their enemies. Let’s see here… Disobedience leads to death. Supremacy is duty. Yep, this is definitely a Grineer ship.” He moved on to the text on another corner. “More of the same over here. Attack, conquer, rule. That’s what a Fomorian is for.”

The third block of text was more useful. “Here we go,” Chirou said. He pointed down one hallway. “That way to the ‘space fly’. Take this other hall if you want the ‘big hurts’. And also that way, the ‘systems access’. That sounds like what we want.”

The Tenno ran at a quick but comfortable pace, pausing at each junction to follow the posted signs toward the Fomorian’s bridge. None gave much consideration anymore to stealth; as long as they had enough open space to shoot, the Tenno would be fine against even a large number of foes. But the Grineer never came, even as they passed by the armory. Shouting Grineer voices could be heard faintly along with occasional bursts of gunfire, whether due to arguments or simple testing it was impossible to tell. 

“Where is everyone?” Jumol asked as the squad descended two levels to find this deck just as deserted. 

“Probably all outside fighting.” Trieven shrugged. “Lotus said it was getting messy out there.”

Lyssa let out a mock sigh. “What’s the world coming to these days? All those Grineer getting their butts kicked, and I’m not getting to do  _ any _ of it. It’s not right.” 

The next signpost pointed them out into a wider hall, slightly curved, with a pair of akkalak turrets thirty feet to the Tenno’s left where the hall ended abruptly. At the sight of the turrets rotating slightly to face the intruders, Chirou sprinted toward them, slipping in between just as their miniguns began to spin up. He dropped to his his knees and typed furiously on the keypad on one turret’s base. 

Trieven followed close behind him as Lyssa vanished again, and Jumol wisely ducked back into the passageway from which they had come. Chirou’s turret flipped off and its barrels spun to a halt before it got a single round of bullets out, but Trieven’s began spraying steel in a line toward Lyssa’s last known position. The software that powered them was aware that a target which had not been seen to leave its range might be invisible, but it lacked the tactical intelligence to cover its entire area in an attempt to flush the target out. 

A few seconds later Trieven’s hacking was also successful, and the second turret ceased its firing. Lyssa decloaked in the corner behind Chirou, and Jumol cautiously poked his head around the corner. Satisfied that they were in no more danger, the squad walked side by side down the wide passage. There were many doors on both sides of the hall, none labeled in large print, and the handful that Lyssa tried were all locked. 

Two more turrets came into view around the gentle curve of the hall, and Jumol threw out his arms to hold the other Tenno back. He stepped back just out of view of the far end and turned around, noticing the first pair were still visible, but just barely. “We’re in the middle now,” he said. “Chirou, any signs around here that say we’re at the control room? This place is certainly guarded better than the rest of the ship.”

Chirou stepped forward to get a closer look at the small writing above the door ahead of them, but pulled back when the turrets swiveled toward him. “Lyssa, go sneak over there and deactivate those. I think that’s the door we want but I can’t quite read it all.” 

The Loki disappeared again and her companions gave her some time to reach the far end and disable the other two turrets. While she was gone, a rumbling sound grew from behind the same door Chirou had tried to examine, louder and louder until there was a muffled clank and then silence. 

The door slid open and a single Grineer stepped out, holding a Gorgon like the standard for heavy gunners. He looked over at the three Tenno and his eyes went wide, and an instant later the blast from Trieven’s Hek shotgun ripped through his armor and a single bullet from Chirou’s Regulators found his forehead. The Grineer’s body was already halfway to the floor by the time the first licks of flame from Jumol’s Ignis reached it. 

Lyssa came running back from the far end of the arced hallway and looked down at the fallen Grineer. “I can’t believe I missed the only action we’ve had so far,” she said. “Turrets are off though. We’re safe here.”

Chirou stepped up to read the sign next to the door. “This area contains highly sensitive materials,” he quoted. “Only Grineer with proper access credentials may enter this area. All others will be terminated.” He looked pointedly at the door, which remained open, then back to the team. “That doesn’t look like very good security.”

“Is that an elevator?” Trieven asked. 

“We’re still up near the top of the Fomorian, but we must be in front of the main engine cavity now. It makes sense to have the bridge closer to where the big laser shoots from.” Chirou started to walk into the elevator but paused. “Someone should stand guard up here. We don’t want to be surprised by any Grineer coming down behind us.”

“I’ll do it,” Jumol volunteered. “I’m not much of a hacker and I could do with some alone time after all the fighting earlier anyway. You all go ahead.”

The other three Tenno stepped through the door, which shut behind them. The elevator automatically started moving downward, as it detected movement within its walls and inferred the presence of a user. The squad readied their weapons, facing the second set of doors opposite the ones they had come in. 

They reached the bottom and stood with bated breath waiting for the machine to finally secure itself and open the doors. The metal slid aside to reveal a wide semicircular room lined with yellow control panels. There were three chairs set into a groove in the floor so they could slide around to all the controls; the one on the left was empty but the other two contained startled Grineer, clutching at their weapons as they stood. 

“Fomorian commanders, you are relieved of duty.” Chirou raised his twin pistols and fired both simultaneously, piercing directly through the foreheads of each Grineer. They slumped to the ground, and Chirou stepped over the center one’s body to look at the ship’s controls. Everything was labeled in the Grineer alphabet, but to him this was no issue. 

The voice of the Lotus crackled in the squad’s ears, covered by a thin layer of static but still understandable. “You’ve reached the bridge of the Balor Fomorian? Excellent work.”

“We have, Lotus.” Trieven confirmed the message she had sent to the Tenno’s leader. “What should we do from here?”

“Use it to help with the battle outside, if you believe you can do so. When the fighting is done, patch me in and I’ll steer it toward Earth for our mission there. This ship belongs to the Tenno now.”

Chirou spoke up, leaning his warframe back against the central control panel and casually pressing a few buttons with one hand without even looking down. “Actually, Lotus, that’s where you’re wrong. This ship does not belong to the Tenno… it belongs to  _ me _ . After all, I’m the one who ordered it built.” At the back of the room, the elevator door slid shut and locked itself with a click. 

“What? What are you saying?” The Lotus’s shocked words echoed the sentiment of the other two Tenno. 

The Mesa gave a mocking shrug. “I’m saying that your dear Chirou never made it out of Kuva Fortress. Although, he did find what he was looking for…” The warframe unholstered the long black and red scepter from across its back and held it up proudly, then threw back its head in a shrill laugh. “I am Astra, Queen of the Grineer! This body and this ship are mine, and mine alone.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was nice knowing you. My apologies to any innocent bystanders in the room.


	6. The Blight Within, part 3

Lyssa and Trieven stared, dumbfounded, at the impostor before them. Could Chirou really be gone? Their squadmate and friend for decades, killed without mercy, his body stolen and used by one of the Grineer Queens? Tenno were supposed to be invincible. All three of them had died many times before only to wake up aboard their orbiters again; only Jumol seemed to take more meticulous care and keep his antique Chroma in good condition. 

But there was a certain ring of truth to the Mesa’s words that was just undeniable. Chirou had never been the type for elaborate pranks, and even so this would be going too far. Especially right in front of the Lotus… No, it had to be real. It was all true: the boy who had fought alongside them just now, displaying such heroism against the Grineer, was none other than the Grineer’s own leader. 

“What’s the matter with you? Kavat got your tongues?” The Queen’s taunting words interrupted the pair’s stunned contemplation. “I was expecting… I don’t know. More?”

“You killed my friend,” Trieven growled, as she brought up her Hek to level it at the Mesa’s chest. 

Astra dropped the kuva scepter to prop it against her shoulder as she raised both hands. “Whoa, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All I did was take what I needed to ensure my own survival. Isn’t that the natural way of things?” She slowly lowered one hand to take the scepter again and placed it across the warframe’s back, then returned to holding both hands out empty in front of her. “I have no desire to fight either of you. The Tenno are a valuable – and more importantly, a  _ finite _ – resource, and I’d really rather not have to kill two more just for mere self-defense.”

“You killed our friend!” Trieven repeated, louder. “Don’t think you’re just going to get away with that!”

“Your  _ friend, _ ” Astra sneered, “received multiple warnings not to enter my fortress, yet he came anyway. And for that I thank him, for in his own folly he saved me.”

“Saved you from what?” Lyssa asked as she put a hand on the Ballistica crossbow at her belt, wary but willing to listen to any weakness the Queen might let slip. 

“From being trapped as a Grineer! Do you have any idea what clone decay feels like?” Astra didn’t wait for an answer. “It feels like you have cancer in every organ at once – because you do! Every Grineer in the system is in constant agony. The death you Tenno grant them is a mercy. You sheltered children, safe in your metal suits, feeling nothing, cutting down armies without a care in the world…”

She leaned back on the edge of the control panel and spread her arms wide. “It’s all just a game to you, isn’t it? Following orders from your omniscient mother, never thinking or planning for yourselves.” Astra relaxed her posture and shook her head in disdain. “No ambition, any of you. You’ve gotten complacent, sitting on all this power but with none of the will–” Without even pausing her sentence, Astra drew her Regulators in an instant and started shooting at the two warframes in front of her. She shouted her final words over the din of bullets,  “–to actually use it!”

The Loki and Nova Prime both flinched instinctively under the sudden assault, but the attacking warframe’s automated targeting systems negated any benefit from their movement. Each turned to their respective defensive abilities as the barrage continued. Lyssa disappeared, breaking the Mesa’s target lock, but this only doubled the rate of fire toward Trieven. While the Mesa’s hands moved on their own, Astra looked around the control room, trying to pick out any trace of the invisible Loki. 

A small cluster of liquid droplets formed around Trieven’s warframe, absorbing roughly half of the shots coming at her. Astra cancelled the Peacemaker ability as a burst of four crossbow bolts struck her in the shoulder, and enabled her Shatter Shield in its place. Trieven’s swirling droplets flew toward her one by one only to splatter away from the Mesa, dealing negligible damage. 

With her initial panic overcome and the only defense she had put in place, Trieven finally aimed her Hek back at the Queen. She fired, two pumps of the trigger as she always did, but the pellets merely reflected off of the energy field enveloping the Mesa. The blast threw Trieven off her feet while Astra merely flinched like the Nova had punched her. 

“What was that about not wanting a fight?” a disembodied voice called from near the ceiling. Astra glanced up for a moment but saw nothing, and returned her attention to the Nova still laying prone by the door. She holstered the twin pistols and placed a hand on the Tigris Prime slung across her hips, but was startled to see Lyssa, now visible again, dropping headfirst directly onto her. 

The Loki’s hands made contact with her shoulders and a sickening lurch wrenched through them both. Suddenly Astra found herself upside down and falling from where the Loki had just been, her trajectory helped along by a generous downward shove from Lyssa. The Tenno Queen managed to protect her warframe’s head but still landed flat on her back with significant force, and the energy shield surrounding her did nothing to lessen the impact. 

Both Astra and Trieven struggled to pick themselves up off the floor, but the Mesa was in much better condition and got to her feet first. She pivoted around and smacked Lyssa with the back end of her Tigris, then planted one foot on the Loki’s chest to shove her back. 

In as innocent voice as she could muster given the situation, Astra answered the Tenno’s question: “I changed my mind.” She spun again to put her back to the Loki, not caring that another round of four crossbow bolts stuck into her as her defensive aura faded. She set her hands on her shotgun properly and pointed it at Trieven, who was now propped up in a sitting position against the wall. 

Just as Astra’s finger touched the trigger, a swirl of light enveloped the Nova. Void energy pulsed around the frame and the duplex round vanished harmlessly within, the two powerful bullets perhaps emerging in the back of the Tenno’s orbiter to Ordis’s great surprise, or perhaps simply disappearing into the Void. A pale young woman with blonde hair to her waist tumbled out of the light and cast a single wave of energy toward Astra before swirling the Void around herself to phase halfway out of the physical realm. 

“Lyssa, do your disarm thing!” The Tenno had to call out her suggestion aloud now that she was no longer in her warframe. 

Astra whirled around and saw the Loki winding up to release a burst of energy that would disrupt the firing mechanisms of every gun in the room, her own automatic crossbow included. The Queen shot at her in an attempt to prevent the ability from completing, but narrowly missed the side of the Loki’s head. Electricity crackled through both active warframes, and her second round failed to leave the barrel. 

A blast of Void energy struck the back of Astra’s leg and she looked back to get a brief glimpse of the other Tenno just fading out of the world again. She threw the Tigris Prime toward the wisps of blue-green light but it passed through harmlessly and came to rest in the far corner of the floor. Lyssa too now exited her warframe in a flash of pale pink. She ran around behind the empty Loki, using it as a barrier while she slipped a ceramic dagger off its belt. 

“You think swapping forms will keep you safe?” Astra cried as she slung the long kuva scepter off her back once again. “Think again, children!” Another blast of energy struck her from behind, its effect more dizzying than painful as the uncontrolled burst interacted with the Queen’s own Transference link. 

She took a swipe at Lyssa with the back end of the staff as she returned all attention to the fallen Nova Prime. It was in bad shape and its operator had long since abandoned it as a platform for her attacks, but it still maintained the connection between Trieven’s true physical form aboard her ship and the half-real projection of her that continued to lash at Astra with glowing whips of light. The Mesa endured the assault, though its shields had failed. Astra ignored the two Tenno as she raised the kuva scepter over her head, and brought down its point as hard as she could into the Nova’s chest. 

Trieven flashed back into the visible world and crumpled to the ground, gasping for breath. With the somatic core of her warframe destroyed, it could no longer maintain the link between the Tenno’s multiple existences, and so the Transference stream collapsed back into a single point around her active location. The Tenno form here in the Fomorian was now Trieven’s singular body, fully solid and real… and fully mortal. 

Instinctively Lyssa went to help her squadmate. She left herself wide open to an attack from Astra as she tried to help or at least comfort the shocked girl, but the Queen’s attention was elsewhere. A shove toppled the inactive Loki back off its feet; its shoulders struck the edge of the control panels as it fell but there was no mind within to feel the impact. Astra raised her staff again, and used the weight of the Mesa she wore to help thrust it through the center of the less damaged warframe before her. 

“Had enough yet? I still don’t want to actually kill you, but I did have to get those warframes out of the way.” The only response to Astra’s challenge was an incoherent groan as the two Tenno slowly recovered from being picked up by their minds and violently thrown across many kilometers of space. 

“Was that a yes? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were trying to say you surrender.” The Queen shook her head in disappointment. “What was I  _ just _ saying about you getting complacent and not using the power you had? That was two on one! You should have been able to take me. But you let yourselves get distracted, and now look at you.”

Astra left the pair alone for a while and sat down in the central command seat. She typed quickly into the Grineer keypad and one of the many small screens above lit up with static, which then cleared into a video communication channel. She waved the top of the kuva scepter in front of the computer system and stated, “Teshin Dax, your Queen commands you: Report to the bridge of the Balor Fomorian at once, but maintain your cover with the Tenno.”

“Yes, my Queen.” Teshin nodded simply and shut the channel without a further word. 

“Teshin…?” A weak voice from one of the Tenno croaked. “What’s he…”

Astra spun the commander’s chair around. “Oh yes,” she said, “Your dear Conclave master takes orders from the Grineer Queens, didn’t you know? He’s worked for the two of us since… well, since the first time we met. He’s a Dax, and we’re the last two living Orokin. Teshin has to obey us whether he wants to or not.”

The Queen pushed off against the floor again and spun a full turn and a half in her chair before grabbing onto the control panel to stop herself. She opened a new communications link, this one requiring special credentials before the channel could be established. 

A young Grineer face appeared on the screen, with glowing yellow eyes and her hair tied up into two rigid cones. “Fomorian commander, what– oh! Astra, it’s you! It is you, right?”

“Of course it’s me, Ozma, you silly girl. I had the access codes to call you in Kuva Fortress, didn’t I?” Astra’s words were teasing, but for the first time her tone seemed genuinely kind. “How has everything been in my absence? No one’s been giving you any problems, I hope?”

“All good here! What about on your end?”

Astra snickered. “Infiltrating the Tenno was easy. Not going to lie, I made some mistakes, but by the  _ Void _ these children are gullible. I didn’t know my way around their ship, I took the wrong archwing and I  _ still _ don’t know any of its abilities besides the blink, I revealed that I could read Grineer… even with the flimsiest excuses, they never raised an eyebrow. This will all be even easier than we thought.”

“Are you going to stay undercover? It’s useful work, but on the other hand…” Ozma sighed. “I don’t like having to be away from you like this. When’s the last time we were more than a kilometer apart? Must be years by now.”

“I’m not sure I should stay out here. I, uh… may have told the Lotus who I am.” At her sister’s shocked expression, Astra put her head in her hands. “I know, I know, I should have kept quiet. But what fun is there in beating your enemy if you can’t even watch their face when they see what you’ve done?”

A voice came from behind the Queen. “We’re not beaten yet,” Trieven growled, and a thin beam of blue light shot past the top of Astra’s chair to strike the wall in front of them. 

“Oh, that reminds me,” Astra went on, still speaking to her sister and ignoring the two Tenno at the back of the room. “I’ve secured a Continuity for you as well. We can both be Void demons, and look!” She slid her seat to the side and turned the screen to face the Tenno. “You even have options!”

Trieven had moved to support herself against the wall next to the elevator door, leaning back with both legs stretched out in front of her. Lyssa was curled up beside her, resting her head and shoulders on her squadmate’s lap. Her skin was somewhat darker than Trieven’s, and though they had the same volume of hair Lyssa’s was bunched up into tight curls that fell half across her face. She looked away as the second Queen’s gaze fell upon the pair, and Trieven lowered her hand from attack position to wrap protectively around the other girl’s waist. 

“Ooh, pretty,” Ozma said. “I like them both. I can’t wait to be properly human again… there’s so many things I just can’t do in this awful half-mechanical Grineer suit. So many things  _ we _ can’t do… I assume you’ll be taking the other, Astra?”

“I was thinking about it. We’ve got more than enough kuva. But I also had the thought… I’ve never had a male body before. It feels weird and I don’t really want to keep it forever, but it would be a shame if we never explored its full range of functions, right? My next Continuity can wait a while. Yours, though…” Astra glanced back at her sister. “You’ve got a difficult choice to make.”

“Don’t I know it.” Ozma’s artificial eyes flashed orange then back to yellow. “The eternal dilemma: do I want to look at her or be her? Which do you think would fit me better?”

“How about neither of us, you vile Grineer scum!” Trieven called. She raised her hand to release another beam of Void energy, but Lyssa pulled her arm back down around her. The Nova operator settled for more insults instead. “The body you’ve got suits you just fine: tiny and weak and uglier than a plains kuaka! I hope the clone decay hits you twice as hard as a normal Grineer, so you can rot like the living garbage you are!”

Ozma’s eyes instantly turned a bright red. “Now, now, is that any way to speak to your Queen? Dearest sister, is there any way you could silence this vessel for a while?” 

Astra cast about the room for any sort of muzzle or gag, but found nothing suitable for the purpose. She merely shrugged and apologized to the other Queen as Trieven continued to yell at them both. 

“Wait, you two are  _ sisters? _ But, what you were saying about Chirou’s body… oh my god, you can’t be serious. That’s  _ disgusting, _ you know that? I can’t even think of how utterly revolting you two are.” Trieven grimaced and broke eye contact. 

Astra, on the other hand, seemed almost proud. “Better than sisters… we’re twins! We’ve been together since before we were born, and that’s how it will always stay. We’re two halves of a whole, and what a magnificent whole it is!” 

“That makes it even worse! How can you possibly think it’s okay to… eugh. I can’t even… oh my god, that’s awful.”

“Who else could possibly understand us the way we know each other?” Astra challenged, now defensive. “Who else could I possibly love more?” Her voice rose in volume and began to crack with emotion. “Who else was  _ left _ for us after you devils betrayed the Empire? You think we  _ wanted _ to end up like this? Surrounded by filthy, mutated idiots? I hate the Grineer!” Astra put her face in her hands and continued in a softer voice. “She’s the only thing that’s been keeping me sane all these years. We need each other.” Far away in her somatic link, the cheeks of Astra’s sleeping form were soaked with tears. 

A new voice, barely audible, spoke up with a simple proposal. “Then why don’t you just… quit?” Lyssa asked. “Renounce it all. It’s a big solar system. Leave the Grineer and the Tenno both well alone.”

“And what kind of life would that be, for princesses of the Orokin?” Ozma retorted. “Ruling an empire is our birthright and nothing is going to get in our way.” Her eyes faded to blue. “We’ll get through this, Astra my beloved. I’ve made up my mind. Take the annoying one and come back to Kuva Fortress. It will all be okay, once you’re back here with me.”

Astra slowly lifted her head again and looked at the screen, and nodded. Just as she was about to speak, a series of metallic clicks sounded from behind her and she whirled around, but the Tenno had not moved. The elevator door slid open to reveal Teshin in his shining Dax uniform, alone, his weapons sheathed. He took one step into the room and got down on one knee facing the Mesa in the pilot’s seat. 

“I have come, my Queen. What do you require of me?”

Instantly Astra’s spirits lifted and the anguish in her voice was overwritten with the same old confidence that had led her here. “My sister wants her Continuity and you’re going to bring it to her,” she said. “You did such a good job luring in mine, after all.” She stood up and held the kuva scepter out in front of her. “Teshin Dax, I – hold on, Lotus transmission coming through.”

The Sentient’s voice was projected from the Mesa’s own speech systems so that all could hear, though the static overlaying it was thicker now. “Tenno! There is a spy within our ranks. The Grineer Queens have compromised one of our own: Chirou Zephan, last seen using a Mesa colored red and gold. If you encounter this Tenno in the field, treat them as hostile and attempt to capture them alive.” 

There was a pause as the Lotus ended one transmission and began another to a subset of the Tenno. “Fomorian assault team, I have further information for you about the infiltrator. Chirou was among the first boarding party and his squad reached the Fomorian’s bridge. I have had difficulty reaching them within the ship, so prepare for the worst. Do not count on the Fomorian being friendly when it reactivates.” 

Astra sighed heavily. “Well, there goes the plan of keeping this body a while. I wish I could tell that Void-damned robot she’s just doomed another one of her precious children, but we can’t let her know who I am again. Sorry, Ozma, looks like I’m getting back in a normal body sooner than I thought.” 

She waited a moment to make sure no further transmissions were going to come through, then raised the scepter again. “Teshin Dax, I enforce the following orders upon you. Subdue and silence this blonde Tenno known as Trieven without causing permanent harm to her body. After my own Continuity is complete, take her and the kuva scepter to my sister in Kuva Fortress as fast as you can safely do so. Discourage anyone you encounter from following you and make reasonable efforts to avoid detection. Prioritize safe delivery of the girl and scepter above all other concerns, including your own safety.”

“As you wish.” Teshin stood and turned to to the two Tenno. “I’m sorry. I can’t disobey, not as long as she–” He stumbled backward as a blast of Void energy washed over him. “Good! Resist!” 

Trieven extricated herself from underneath Lyssa as carefully as she could and staggered to her feet. She threw one hand out toward Teshin’s face but the Dax twisted out of the way of the Void beam just in time and grabbed her wrist to avert a second attack. Teshin brought a knee up directly into the Tenno’s stomach and she doubled over, too out of breath to exercise any more of her Void powers. 

The two Queens watched the pair struggle but Astra made no attempt to join in; meanwhile Lyssa merely sat cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed. Teshin brought a single gloved fist down on the back of Trieven’s head and the Tenno slumped to the floor, unconscious. He stared at Astra and said to her, “Do what you mean to do now, lest this one wake before my orders allow me to continue. Repeated incapacitation might very easily become permanent harm.”

“Right. Just one thing to take care of first…” Astra leaned over the control panels and began throwing switches. An alarm sounded, then got cut off seconds later as the Queen continued to manipulate the Fomorian’s systems. “There we go,” she announced. “Ozma, I’m going to hang up now. I’d estimate we have… oh, maybe ten minutes before the core goes critical? It’s time for me to leave.”

Astra pointed the kuva scepter directly at Lyssa’s head as the screen with her sister’s face went dark. The Tenno remained seated, perfectly still and unresponsive, though she had to be aware of everything that was going on in the room. The Queen focused, trying to activate the mind-altering powers of the red oil at the scepter’s tip… but nothing happened. 

“What’s the problem here?” she asked aloud. “I can jump into a warframe but not out of one, is that it? By the Void, I’ll never understand why this stuff is so picky.” A swirl of light surrounded the Mesa and the body of a Tenno boy now stood in front of it. “Let’s try that again,” Astra muttered to herself as she took the scepter out of the warframe’s loose grip. 

Nothing happened. “Ugh, don’t tell me it needs the real body… I  _ was _ going to just cut the link and wake up far away from here, but not after what the Sentient said. Alright, fine…” Astra sat down on the floor facing Lyssa. “Teshin, destroy the Mesa warframe beyond repair, and then return to your previous orders.”

The Dax complied. In a single fluid motion he drew his nikana and swooped forward to grab the warframe’s neck. He hooked one foot around the back of the Mesa’s knees to bring it down onto the control panels behind, and jabbed his sword directly up through the less armored spot under its chin. Astra swayed and put a hand to her head, but commanded that Teshin do more damage to the empty warframe. 

A deep stab to the next weak point beneath the Mesa’s left arm made Astra so dizzy she could no longer see, and when Teshin wrenched his nikana’s handle upward to slice through the warframe’s interior the final link was severed and she collapsed to the floor. A moment later she slowly sat up again and yawned. “I thought I was prepared for that, but wow. That really does hurt.” She grabbed onto the chair beside her and pulled herself up to sit in it, and aimed the kuva scepter once again. 

This time the elixir of immortality finally had an effect. An aura of red spread up Astra’s arm to surround her head, and from the end of the scepter a thin line of light cut through the air to touch the Tenno’s chest. The red aura spread upward over Lyssa’s face as well to form a continuous stream from Astra to her target. The diffuse mist grew brighter for just a moment, then evaporated into nothing, clearing itself from the kuva’s wielder and the staff itself in a single fast wave. 

As the aura retreated onto Lyssa alone, the liquid on the end of the scepter vanished with it, leaving an empty vial behind as the staff slipped from the grasp of the hand that held it. It dropped with a solid thud to the floor, followed soon after by the body that had once belonged to Chirou, as it slumped forward out of the chair to land with its neck propped at an odd angle against the bottom panels under the controls. Silently Teshin leaned down to pick up the empty scepter, then slung Trieven’s unconscious form over his shoulder and stepped into the elevator to depart. 

Up above, Jumol was frantically typing on the Grineer keypad next to the elevator door while Serreta paced nervously back and forth behind him. At the sound of whirring gears from below she straightened up and stood perfectly still in her best imitation of an empty warframe. Jumol looked up from his attempt at hacking and readied his hands to release Void blasts in case the Grineer Queen was trying to flee. 

When the doors slid open and Teshin stepped out instead, the Tenno stood down. Words poured out almost faster than he could think them. “Teshin! I know you told me to go look for remaining Grineer but I heard what the Lotus said about Chirou and I had to come back. Is it true? What’s going on down there? Is that Trieven? Is she okay? Where’s Lyssa?” He grabbed at Teshin’s arm even as the Dax tried to walk away. 

“It’s true,” Teshin confirmed. “Get out of here, fast. The Queen’s rigged the ship to explode.” He pulled away but Jumol was insistent. “This one is unconscious but alive. I’m taking her out with me.”

“And Lyssa? She was down there too! What happened?”

Teshin shook his head. “If she’s not already dead, she will be soon. Go, save yourself! You can make it out before the core melts down.”

Jumol had no intention of leaving without his team, or whoever was left from among them. He stepped into the elevator and Serreta followed, making no attempt to hide from Teshin now. The Conclave master had his back turned to the pair as he left at a run. Only once the elevator was in motion did Jumol transfer back to within the living warframe. 

The doors slid open and both Tenno were stunned at the sight of the carnage within the Fomorian control room. Two dead Grineer. Three warframes inactive, two with an obvious hole punched through their center and the third disabled with surgical precision. Bullet holes in the walls and several computer screens shattered. Chirou’s human body, laying facedown with his head propped in a position that couldn’t possibly be comfortable, but breathing. 

And Lyssa, sitting on the floor and holding a knife pointed at her own chest, her hand seemingly frozen in place. The newcomers in their shared Chroma hurried over and dropped to their knees in front of the girl, gently taking her wrist in one hand. Lyssa’s eyes flickered toward them and she hissed through gritted teeth, “Jumol… kill me… the Queen, she’s…”

Her head jerked suddenly to one side, and the hand holding the ceramic dagger pushed a few inches farther away. “Take this knife away,” she pleaded. “She’s possessing me… to kill me then leave.” Her fingers twitched but the dagger remained in her grasp. 

A gasp of pain escaped her lips and the Tenno grimaced, breaking eye contact but continuing to speak to her squadmate. “She’s lying! I let her in… Kill this body, it’s the only way!”

The dagger jerked inward again but the Chroma’s grip kept it mostly in place. “Settle down now, you two,” Jumol said as he gently but firmly wrested the blade out of the Tenno’s hand. He cast the dagger aside and pulled Lyssa and her unwanted guest to their feet. 

“No! I can’t fight this war within forever. Kill her from outside while I keep her busy!” Lyssa winced again and blinked rapidly. “Seven minutes until we’re all dead of omega radiation. I need to get out of here and she’s trying to kill us both.” She slumped against the Chroma’s front for a moment then regained her balance. “Good! This body is  _ mine! _ So if I want to end it, I will!”

“Cut it out, both of you! Stop fighting and we can sort this out when we’re  _ not _ standing on top of an overheating reactor.” Jumol made sure the pair were standing and not in danger of collapsing again, then darted over to examine Chirou’s body. 

“Leave it!” Lyssa, or maybe Astra, called to him. “There’s no one home. He’s been dead for hours.” 

Jumol nodded solemnly. He rolled his friend’s body over to lay it out flat on the floor, and gently closed its eyes. “Alright. Let’s get out of here. I’m not letting anyone else die today.” The girls were starting to look unsteady on their feet, so Jumol wrapped his arms around them in a bear hug and lifted them up to stumble toward the elevator door. 

“Are you really going to save one of the Grineer Queens just to save one friend?” one of them asked. 

“I pissed off the entire Red Veil and dealt with them trying to murder me for years just to save one friend,” Jumol replied. “Grineer Queen or not, I won’t leave  _ anyone _ behind. But you two are going to have to get along for these next few minutes.” He carried the pair into the elevator and hit the button with an elbow. 

As they were carried slowly to the upper level, Jumol knelt down to look the human body in the eyes. “Lyssa, I know this is scary,” he said. “But you need to let the Queen take over now. She can read Grineer and we can’t. Just step back, try to relax as much as you can… it will feel like you’re falling asleep. Just focus on yourself, stay alive in there. I’ll get you back, I swear.”

His words seemed to have the opposite of the desired effect, as the Tenno’s face only grew more fearful. Jumol pulled her into an embrace and the Tenno rested her head on the Chroma’s shoulder. 

A moment later, she pushed away and looked at him with disdain. “Call your Cephalon,” she said icily, as the elevator doors opened and both stepped out into the hall. “We’re going to the secondary hangar. Front right of the Fomorian.” She jogged forward a few feet, then stopped to put a hand to her head and close her eyes for a moment. 

“I’ll carry you,” Jumol volunteered, catching up and lifting the girl effortlessly to sit on his shoulder as he ran. “Just point the way at each junction and we’ll all make it in time.”

“You know, you’re taking this  _ really _ well,” the Queen remarked. “My name is Astra, by the way. Turn left up here, and take the stairs.”

“Yeah, well, I know what it’s like.” A swirl of Void energy surrounded the Chroma and then Jumol was in human form, running alongside the warframe as it continued moving without him. 

“Hi there, both of you!” A girl’s voice emanated from the warframe where previously there had been Jumol. “I’m Serreta. Lyssa, you might know me as Jumol’s dead girlfriend from a hundred years ago. I’m still alive. Obviously.”

“Another left,” Astra directed. “And my host is confused. She says she was at your funeral and saw your body.”

“Oh, yeah, I was there too,” Serreta said brightly. “I helped carry my own casket. Afterwards I visited Margulis at her shiva and talked about how great I was, and how much I always loved myself. Faking your death is so fun.”

“My passenger wants to know why, though personally I’m more interested in how. Especially if you had a whole fake body on display.”

Serreta chuckled. “Oh, no, the body was real. It did die, I just wasn’t in it anymore.”

“You’re  _ Orokin? _ A Tenno?” Astra laughed so hard she almost fell backwards off her perch, and Serreta had to pause to get her balanced again. “If any of the old Executors heard about that, they’d have a stroke. So what did you do, take a Continuity into your friend here and then just… not kill him?”

“Not quite,” Jumol answered her. “She’s just the warframe now. That was the Red Veil incident I mentioned: they helped transfer her consciousness to the Chroma permanently, then we ran away before they could use her for their own purposes. Sometimes I take my own warframe on missions, sometimes I tag along with her.”

“Now that’s a trick I haven’t heard of before. I think I can guess how it works though.” Astra pointed up ahead. “Door on the right, take the stairs up three levels. We’re almost there.”

“Good. There can’t be much time left before this whole place goes up in flames.” Jumol’s human form vanished in a flash of light as he returned to take a backseat in the warframe. 

“So, Astra… you’re legit Orokin, right?” Serreta tried to engage the girl in conversation. “Sounded like you knew the Executors pretty well, at least. What was it like?”

Astra grimaced and shook her head. “My sister and I were hated almost as much as you Tenno were,” she said. “We were just less public. We’re identical twins, which means we would have been killed at birth if it weren’t for our father, Executor Roviik. He spared our lives and killed every nurse who had seen us, then raised us to learn identical skills and identical hobbies and to never be seen in the same place. No one found out until we were eight, and by then it was too late for anyone to quietly do away with us. 

“That was about the time the Zariman was set to depart. I don’t know for sure because we were so young at the time, but it’s possible our discovery was a factor in why our family was not on board. Executor Viridia was sent on the Zariman instead, and when it was declared lost Avantus was promoted in her place.” The Queen chuckled briefly. “Avantus had one of the shortest terms in Orokin history: only eleven years between confirmation and getting herself murdered by the Grineer. As much as I hate being around the tube-men, I’m glad they work for me and not against me.”

Astra grinned. “Have faith in yourself and the universe will align to your benefit,” she quoted. “One of the core Vain Faith values, and it hasn’t let us down yet. Saved from shipwreck in the Void, given control over the Grineer before they’d established their own leadership, a new body walking into my fortress right when I was starting to need one… And now look at me, being literally carried to safety by my own sworn enemies. Ozma and I love ourselves and each other, and so the universe loves us too.”

Jumol snorted in disgust. “We’re only saving you because you’re holding Lyssa hostage,” he growled. “If I ever find out you’ve killed another one of my friends, that will be the end of your reign of terror right then and there.”

On the uppermost level, the stairwell door swung open with a hard shove from the Chroma. A gap directly across the wide hallway led onto a vast open platform, its floor delineated into sections of all sizes by stripes of yellow paint. Grineer ships were parked over a few distant spaces on one side but most were empty, having already flown out through the energy barrier that comprised much of the roof and the far wall. Those ships still present were surrounded by Grineer rushing to get in and fly them away from here. 

A handful of the Grineer looked up as the Tenno entered, and a call went up as they recognized a warframe’s shape. They hurried to retrieve the weapons they had packed onboard and charged in no coherent formation to attack. 

“Serreta, you handle the Grineer,” Jumol said aloud. “Call Ordis down here and I’ll get Lyssa into the landing craft.” The boy transferred out and supported Astra as she was set down, then the warframe he had just spoken through ran off without him toward the oncoming crowd. “Come on,” he said, slinging Astra’s arm over his own shoulders. “Let’s get down to the far end where there’s room for Ordis to land.”

The pair half-walked, half-ran toward the open end of the hangar as gunfire erupted behind them. Astra seemed stronger and less worn out than before and Jumol remarked on the change, only to be given a sarcastic, flippant response. “It’s amazing how much easier it is to run when I don’t have someone trying to murder me from inside my own head.”

A low rumble shook the room and Astra stumbled but regained her balance. “Oh, and there goes the first supplemental power core, right on time. There’s sixteen of them around the outside of the main engi–”

“I know,” Jumol interrupted her. “I’ve shot up quite a few of them myself.” 

The streamlined form of a Liset came into view overhead, and passed by to make a wide circle around to face the open wall. It glided in through the energy net and came to a gentle stop a comfortable distance away from any ships or bodies, and settled slowly to the floor. A hatch on the side of its polished burgundy exterior slid open just as two more distant explosions rocked the area. 

“We need to get out of here  _ fast _ ,” Jumol said. “Hold on tight now.” He stopped running and turned to face Astra, grabbing her other arm to throw around himself while he forcibly embraced her as well. A surge of Void energy wrenched them both out of the physical plane, followed by a larger burst of power catapulting the pair forward in an instant. A second dash carried them to the side of the Liset, and both became visible again as Jumol collapsed to the ground. 

He gasped for breath, all his energy spent to carry himself and a second body those last few tens of meters, as far below a fourth engine core ruptured and sent shockwaves through the Fomorian. Two more booms followed in close succession, shaking the floor and knocking the exhausted Tenno back down as he tried to stand. A hand reached down for him and instinctively he took it and pulled with all his failing strength, clinging to the arm of his rescuer. He staggered up the ramp into the Liset and once onboard, dropped again to lay flat on his back on the floor. 

The voice of the ship Cephalon sounded from above. “Operators! Are you okay? What happened to your warframes?”

“Warframe. Right. Just a moment…” Jumol concentrated and sent one last small flare of Void energy through his Transference link, summoning the Chroma back around him. He gladly took a backseat to the body’s permanent inhabitant, eager to rest a while without the burden of physical existence. Serreta stood up and led the way up to the navigation console. 

“Operator Lyssa, will you call your warframe back as well? It is not safe to remain here. I am detecting dangerous levels of omega radiation.”

“I don’t have one anymore,” Astra said. “Just get us out of here as fast as you can.” More explosions rumbled from below as she spoke, and the landing craft rose gently off the ground and began to turn. 

“Don’t bother flying away,” Serreta called. “Just do a Void jump, now! We won’t get far enough in normal space.”

“It is dangerous in an enclosed space – but I see your point. Executing Void jump maneuver…” The ship’s warp engines kicked on with a low hum. They held steady for a moment as Ordis attempted to compensate for the Void echoes produced by the nearby walls, then rose to full power and twisted the landing craft out of the Fomorian’s hangar into the vast empty expanse of the Void. 

“Where would you like me to take you, Operators?” Ordis asked. 

“Uhh… solar rail around Saturn, I guess? That’s fairly close by. We can pick up the main orbiter again once mom tells us it’s safe to return.” A reminder from her partner prodded at the back of Serreta’s mind. “Oh, and the Railjack too. We kind of abandoned Cephalon Cy back there. But I’m sure he’ll be okay.”

Jumol came to the front again as Serreta stepped back from the body’s control. He leaned the warframe back against a bulkhead and looked over at the other Tenno. “So, Astra… you could have left me behind back there, but you helped me up. Why?” 

Astra’s eyes went wide and she stuttered and stumbled over her words, but she was saved from answering by Ordis who had overheard. “Who is Astra?” the Cephalon asked. “Are you referring to Operator Lyssa? Shall I update the name on file?”

Jumol sighed. “Ordis… say hello to Grineer Queen Astra, currently hijacking Lyssa’s body. We seem to have a sort of ceasefire, I hope? Since we, uh… kind of all saved each other’s lives in there.” He gave Astra a pointed look, but the Queen merely shrugged. “She’s with us for the foreseeable future, anyway. She’s holding Lyssa captive in her own mind, so we’ll be keeping a  _ very _ close eye on her to make sure she doesn’t do anything she shouldn’t.”

“Ah. Well then, greetings, non-Operator. Please have an unpleasant stay. Are you familiar with what the Tenno frequently do to Grineer?”

Astra rolled her eyes. “Yes, Cephalon, I am aware,” she hissed through gritted teeth toward the ceiling. Returning her gaze to the Chroma, she continued, “But you, Tenno… I  _ should _ have left you behind. You’d served your purpose. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Maybe there’s a shred of humanity left in you after all?” Serreta proposed, mostly to poke fun at the Queen but with a note of seriousness in her voice. “It’s actually my life you saved, not Jumol’s,” she pointed out. “He would have just woken up in his pod, but I was physically on the Fomorian like you. So thanks for getting him to safety where he could summon me.”

The ship’s comms system crackled to life. “Tenno! Tenno, are you there?” The Lotus’s frantic voice sounded through the room and the lavender hologram appeared on the main screen. 

“I’m here, Lotus,” Jumol responded. 

“Oh, thank god you’re okay. The Fomorian exploded. The Queen must have sabotaged it. People have lost warframes, archwings, there’s even some with damage to their landing craft. I’ve been checking up on everyone who was there, but your squad was in the middle of it all. How are all of you doing?”

“I’m fine. Lyssa is here on my ship.” Jumol indicated the girl next to him, though he made no mention of the Orokin currently piloting her body. “All the warframes except mine were destroyed in a fight. When I last saw Trieven she was unconscious, but Teshin was there and he carried her out. She’ll be okay too.” 

Astra’s face suddenly contorted in pain and she raised a hand to block the camera’s view as she looked away. She leaned on the bulkhead and from Jumol’s vantage point he could see her furiously whispering to herself, out of the Lotus’s view. 

“Teshin…” The image of Margulis looked pensive. “I don’t like to suggest this, but I’m not certain he can be trusted. He has baggage from his past which I thought would never trouble him again, but if the Grineer Queens have kuva… Just be careful, and use your best judgement. What happened with Chirou and the Queen?”

Jumol broke eye contact with the screen. “Chirou is dead. None of us had any idea it wasn’t him. The whole battle outside… Astra strategized and fought like a Tenno. But Chirou’s body is dead now too. Everything is under control.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but there’s more than one Grineer Queen. We’ll have to be on high alert in case the other makes a move. Thanks for checking in.” 

The hologram faded from the screen, and Jumol looked over to see Astra staring at him in bewilderment. “You just lied to the Lotus,” she said. “Why would you cover for me like that?”

Jumol snorted. “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve left out a few key details. The Lotus don’t even know Serreta is alive. But I was telling her the truth there: the situation  _ is  _ under control. There’s only one somatic link on my orbiter and I’m already in it, so you’re not going anywhere.”

“But I’m the only one who knows how to get myself out of this body, so you can’t rescue your friend by force,” Astra replied. “Anything you do to me, you do to her.” 

“True, but if you kill Lyssa, we’ll kill you, and I want regular checkups where you let her out in front to say she’s okay. All in all, I believe this mutual hostage situation is a rather stable arrangement.” Jumol extended a hand. “So for now at least, I’d say we have a truce. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Astra stared at him for a long moment. “Yes…” she said, as she slowly reached out to take the Chroma’s hand. “I suppose we do.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is on hiatus as of 8/28/19. We do plan to come back to it, but we're a little burned out on Warframe at the moment and have been writing fic for RWBY instead. Sorry for the wait.


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